Crow-Work

Poetry

Crow-Work

“Dazzlingly alert.” —MARY SZYBIST
Share this title 

“What is a song but a snare to capture the moment?” This central question drives Crow-Work, Eric Pankey’s ekphrastic exploration of the moment where emotion and energy flood a work of art.

Through subjects as diverse as Brueghel’s Procession to Calvary, Anish Kapoor’s Healing of Saint Thomas, Caravaggio’s series of severed heads, and James Turrell’s experimentation with light and color, the author travels to an impossible past, despite being firmly rooted in the present, to seek out “the songbird in every thorn thicket” of the artist’s work. Short bursts of lyrical beauty burn away “like coils of incense ash”; bodies in the light of a cave flicker, coalesce, and disappear. By capturing the ephemeral beauty of life in these poems, Crow-Work seeks not only to explain great art, but also to embody it.

ISBN:
9781571314543
Publish Date: 
01/20/2015
Pages: 
88
Size: 
5.5 × 8.5 × 0.25 in
Weight: 
4.4 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.

Praise and Prizes

Blog Post