Holy Love, Holy Death

    "I own a small gold locket whose front opens to reveal an intricate grill, which in turn opens to an inner cavity. Here, in the days of the American Civil War, a young woman might place a small lock of hair from her beloved, and in hanging the locket at her throat, attempt to will that person's safety, and somehow with each heartbeat to plead to an often deaf God that the beloved would return to her alive and capable still of loving her. The enclosure is a diminutive echo of the reliquaries of European cathedrals and churches: containers in which rest bits of bone, hair, or fabric that have been part of the person of a saint, to be regarded with awe and faithfully preserved.
     "Eric Pankey's collection Reliquaries, a March 2005 release from Ausable Press to accompany his 2003 collection Oracle Figures, opens with a dedication to the memory of Pankey's brother David. Though the poems neither refer to this brother often nor attempt to sanctify any person, they explore memory as reliquary. In five-lined stanzas whose questions and images scraggle beyond the margins into long turnovers of text, Pankey confronts aging and the loss of valued memory that accompanies this human process. His blunt demands confront: "What is the survival value, I asked, of suffering? The river, a dragon of smoke, stayed mum."
     "I like particularly the crystalline jaggedness of the language. Like the lines of Gerald Manley Hopkins, Pankey's words often trip the inner ear and force re-reading: "One does not turn to the rose for shade, nor the charred song of the redwing for solace. / This past I patch with words is a flaw in the silvering." Charred song of the redwing? Only because of the insistence of "red mist," and the creek that "runs tar in the cloud-light," do I submit to such phrases. I expect explanation, justification for the difficulty of each new image, such as "The earth of ether afloat on bedrock." Sometimes the meaning rattles through the final stanza—and sometimes not.
     "One poem, "Previous Finding," in which the poet admits to taking liberty with the truth "toward accuracy," begins with a description of a walk together, the "we" of the initial stanza fracturing soon into "I" and "you." In the final, fourth, stanza, Pankey offers that "The past is not archaic, not obsolete, but built and rebuilt like a wall of fieldstones," then wrenches the direct explanation back to fragmented images with a concluding line: "The fire-scarred scruff, the elements of emptiness, the calendar of thaws."
     "Much of the time, memory lies in the natural world here: trees shouldering wind, a horse nibbling an apple from the hand, crows and magpies and bright baubles caught in nests. Yet like the title, it insists on stepping out of this world, with steps taken often into darkness and cold water. Pankey spells out, "I am drawn to it: the absence of God in my life as a shark to a falling scrawl of distant blood." Not only is the year a calendar of birthdays and death anniversaries to recall, but also a year of a lectionary, the braided listing of Old and New Testament readings embraced by Christian churches worldwide. In the ashes of his parents, Pankey finds also "the year that is the Lenten season," the season that begins with a finger-smudge of ash on the forehead.
     "Pankey refers to Wallace Stevens both within the versework and in his theorizing about the call to music he finds in poetry, his own and that of Stevens. His writing habits include endless music around him, a distraction from self-consciousness but also a frame of regualrity to press against in order to launch into the scratch and crunch of integrity and doubt. Poetry, he insists, is taken for him to be a means of redemption, a means of unsettling, a force for dislocation, in order to shock the eye away from the expected to the honesty of revelation.
     "The collection pounds toward conclusion as more impulses are spelled out. "I remember well the invention of memory: first one relic in a box and then one more. And then." A few pages later, horse and swallows and crickets force forward a coarse residue in pellet form: "Memory is a bolus of sharp-edged bones, matted fur, gristle, and buckshot." Then, lest we grow too philosophical ourselves as readers and students of the poet, Pankey leaps from the path again into the grit of mud, cicadas, darkness. There is no falling asleep permitted or possible in this lecture hall.
     "Saints and our dead demand fresh eyes. When we think we know them, have salted them away within us, then if we are fortunate, life inserts a hooked claw and drags the memories out again for other views and regrets, announcements and exhilarations. So it is with this collection of poems: What we do not understand but allow to be pressed within us at the first reading becomes the impetus for a second reading, and a third. Reliquaries needs to rest near my favorite reading place. I doubt that I will be able to shelve it successfully away.—Beth Dugger Kanell, Kingdom Books

     “Since the 1980s, I have had the pleasure of reading Eric Pankey’s poetry. I have watched it shift from the precocious, plainspoken meditations of his first book, For The New Year, to the ornate—in both style and ideation—middle poems of spiritual crisis and, in this latest work, Reliquaries, to spiritual surrender. For me, there has been a held-breath expectancy at each new book: the feeling that one used to have when watching a high-wire act was a routine part of the cultural experience of childhood—watching an aerialist turn the simple activity of taking a walk into a spectacle. Like the work of the aerialist (the single figure poised above the crowd) Pankey’s poetry seems to issue from the possibilities of heroic isolation. “A beauty of limitations was lost / on the mob,” Pankey writes in Reliquaries. With each volume I have held my breath to see him not falter in his pursuit of the beautiful.
      "Reliquaries, Pankey’s seventh volume, links itself to his previous books with its memorial and spiritual preoccupations. Perhaps inevitably, the long trajectory of these interests has led critics to describe this work as a “spiritual journey.” Instead of the journey, I much prefer Pankey’s formulation of his own poetic project: that of the triptych. “Journey” denotes a progress through time and the possibility of arrival. The journey, in other words, is in league with the temporal. The triptych is in league with the material: time is stopped in the presence of this object. There is no progression through the triptych. The viewer’s glance is played among the panels, the viewer’s experience written, rewritten, the images presented and re-presented.
     “And so it is, here, in this remarkable new book. These new poems are haunted by the old. There is, however, a grit to the beauties of Reliquaries. As Pankey’s work has traded the tactics of transparent sincerity for manifest artifice, ironically, perhaps, his poems have increased in pathos. One feels in Reliquaries that one is in the presence of the confession, however gorgeously shaped. And gorgeous this book is as well as thoughtful. These are soliloquies of spiritual surrender addressed to the Thou, overheard by the reader. They are 'performances ravishing and spellbinding, flames let loose.'" —Lynn Emanuel