Synopses & Reviews
Cenotaph is the third panel in a triptych of books that began with Apocrypha and continued with The Late Romances. All contain poems "stained with grief," as Pamela Alexander described Pankey's work in the Boston Book Review -- grief for the passing of the poet's parents, of his teachers and friends, and of his own once-held belief.
Pankey's poetry vibrates with a deep and delicate musicality. The natural world that sustains and buries us here becomes refracted into an intricate web of glinting, harrowing light, into words circumscribing absence. Jeff Hamilton said in Delmar that Pankey's eschatological poems are written from the "vantage of the lapsed sublime."
In these extraordinary poems of spiritual crisis, gravity and grace, sacred and profane love, the mythic and the heirloom, are all confronted at the open threshold of an empty tomb -- the cenotaph -- where doubt, not faith, awaits.
Synopsis
Cenotaph (defined by the dictionary as a sepulchral monument erected in memory of a deceased person whose body is buried elsewhere) is the third in a series of Eric Pankey's books (the earlier Apocrypha and The Late Romances are the earlier two). Pankey is a poet with strong religious leanings and this book shows it. As remote as the comparison may seem, it's clearly the 17th century metaphysical poets, like John Donne, who speak to him.
About the Author
Eric Pankey was born in Kansas City, Missouri, graduated from the University of Missouri-Columbia, and received an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. For the New Year, his first collection of poems, was selected as the 1984 winner of the Academy of American Poets' Walt Whitman Award. It was followed by Heartwood (1988), Apocrypha (1991), and The Late Romances (1997). His work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram-Merrill Foundation. He is Professor of English at George Mason University and teaches in the Master of Fine Arts Program. He lives in Fairfax, Virginia, with his wife, the poet Jennifer Atkinson, and their daughter, Clare Atkinson-Pankey.