Augury

Poetry

Augury

“A darkly luminous book by a poet at the height of his considerable poetic power.” —KATHY FAGAN
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From celebrated poet Eric Pankey, a collection exploring the presence of the divine in the seemingly ordinary.

The ancient Romans practiced augury, reading omens in bird’s flight patterns. In the poems of Augury, revelation is found in nature’s smallest details: a lizard’s quick movements, a tree scarred by lighting, the white curve of a snail’s shell. Here the sensory world and the imagined one collide in unexpected and wonderful ways, as Pankey scrutinizes the physical for meaning, and that meaning for truth.

With uncommon grace, each of Pankey’s precise lyrics advances our shared ontological questions and expresses our deepest contradictions. In a world of mystery, should we focus on finding meaning or creating it? How can the known—and the unknown—be captured in language? “If one cannot see clearly,” Pankey writes, borrowing from Freud, “one at least wants / what is unclear to be in focus.”

Augury is a masterful and magical collection from a poet of stirring intelligence, “a book of stones unstitched from the wolf’s belly.”

ISBN:
9781571314796
Publish Date: 
11/14/2017
Pages: 
88
Size: 
5.5 × 8.5 × 0.25 in
Weight: 
7.2 oz
Author
Eric Pankey

Eric Pankey is the author of numerous books of poems, most recently Augury and Crow-Work. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared widely in such journals and anthologies as the New YorkerKenyon ReviewIowa Review, and Best American Poetry. He is a professor of English and the Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University and resides in Fairfax, Virginia.

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