Trace: Poems

By Eric Pankey

From the award-winning poet behind Owl of Minerva, a collection of poems exploring themes of faith, memory, and meaning.

His arresting ninth collection of poems, Eric Pankey’s Trace locates itself at a threshold between faith and doubt—between the visible and the invisible, the say-able and the ineffable, the physical and the metaphysical. Also a map of the poet’s journey into a deep depression, these poems confront one man’s struggle to overcome depression’s smothering weight and presence. And with remarkable clarity and complexity, Trace charts the poet’s attempt to be inspired, to breathe again, to give breath and life to words. Ever solemn, ever existential, Pankey’s poems find us at our most vulnerable, the moment when we as humans—believers and nonbelievers alike—must ultimately pause to question the uncertain fate of our souls.

 

“Pankey’s language is beautiful and spare and he constantly surprises with profound lines. Pankey’s built a name for himself, and considering the quality of the poems in this collection, it’s no surprise.”—C. L. Bledsoe, Coal Hill Review
 

“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.”—Publishers Weekly

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 21, 2013
• ISBN: 9781571318732

Eric Pankey

ERIC PANKEY is also the author of ten collections of poetry and Professor of English and the Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

Book preview

I.

The Sacrifice

Gradually, the blood drains:

A thousand words never meant for scripture.

Still hunkered on the mountain ridge,

The moon: a saline ghost, a mouth

Opened around a hollow syllable.

When we move toward the sacrifice,

God lifts as a swarm — a body of flies —

As sated as God ever is.

A Bird Loose in the House

The frame — a grid — contrives a theater,

A shadow-play alive on a curtain alive with wind.

Call the bird

The arbitrary inventoried in its variety,

Or perhaps

The embarkation into the ongoingness that follows.

The grid — at once minimal and complex —

Holds curves and intersections,

the plot

And the plotted, point by point,

Its line, its echoic spiraling.

Call the bird

The breath that blossoms and wilts.

Displaced, the bird afflicts the space,

Is the stigma by which the flawless is affirmed.

Call the bird

A sparrow

Call the house

The house we live in,

The house of the Lord forever.

The Place of Skulls

One crow, perched on the gallows, oversees the folly.

Still daylight — long shadows of a low sun —

The visible hides the visible.

Somewhere constellations turn like millstones.

After the body’s hauled down, the tree resumes

Its life as a tree: blossoming in season, bearing fruit.

Prayer

When you left it was as if a glacier retreated,

As if the ice tonnage, which rasped, scraped, and scoured for ages,

Diminished in a moon’s single phase to a trickle of meltwater.

I live in its aftermath — till, eskers, erratics, cirques, exposed bedrock.

Moss darkens the far side of a granite boulder. Pines.

Then the valley fills with hardwood forest, which burns and grows again,

Which burns and grows again, which burns and grows again.

Edge of Things

I wait at the twilit edge of things,

A dry spell spilling over into drought,

The slippages of shadow silting in,

The interchange of dusk to duskier,

The half-dark turning half-again as dark.

There: night enough to call it a good night.

I wait for the resurrection, but