Trace

“The poems in Trace come together to create a landscape both melancholy and utterly beautiful, balancing a careful awareness of the ‘once and the to be, / the frost-gnawed grain.’ Tracing the spiritual as he senses it move through the natural world, he reminds us again and again that to ‘occupy a space is to shape it,’ and the shaping of experience becomes finally the shaping of the page in language brilliantly wrought. Trace is Eric Pankey at his finest.”

“Eric Pankey’s poems gleam with authenticity. They are prayers sent into the unknown, for ‘one must penetrate the invisible to reside in the visible.’ One of their great pleasures is the door through which Pankey enters the mysteries: the natural world, with which he has profound intimacy. In language that is always elegant, complex, and rigorously truthful, he transfixes us with glimpses of what we can never fully know.”

“Imbued with stark lyricism, Eric Pankey’s new poems are marvelous palimpsests on the struggles of faith.”

“Eric Pankey’s poetic and spiritual turf has ever been the borderland between paradise and exile, that liminal territory which belongs both to sumptuous, symbiotic rapture and to the banished realm that makes language essential. Beauty-struck, dark with yearning, melancholy, and unlooked-for, salvific joy, these poems extend Pankey’s already capacious and original vision of the God-hungry, remnant self, and thus the lyric poem itself, in inimitably haunted and haunting ways.”

“Eric Pankey’s ninth collection follows the poet into the hushed ‘gray dawn’ of depression as he searches, often in vain, for God, and for faith in nature and himself… . It’s hard to deny the conflict that Pankey explores honestly and powerfully in these new poems.”