Crow-Work: Poems

By Eric Pankey

From the award-winning author of Augury, a poetry collection that examines the power of great works of art.

“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 Bruegel’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.

Praise for Crow-Work

“Eric Pankey’s sensibility is an unerringly generous one: he is always willing to step first onto unsteady ground, to test it for those who might follow. The poems of Crow-Work, like good gleaners, seek out possibility and sustenance. They are skilled, deft, and dazzlingly alert. Just when I think they have brought me as close as possible to the dark and unknowable things that make awe possible, they bring me closer. The journey is unnerving, intimate, and thrilling.” —Mary Szybist

“The delicacy and accuracy we have come to expect from Eric Pankey are here on display and as deftly deployed as ever. Pankey remains one of our leading practitioners of the metaphysical poem.” —C. Dale Young

“[A] wonderful exploration of the emotional power of art.” —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review, PW Picks)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781571318848

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

ASH

At the threshold of the divine, how to know

But indirectly, to hear the static as

Pattern, to hear the rough-edged white noise as song—

Wait, not as song—but to intuit the songbird

Within the thorn thicket, safe, hidden there.

Every moment is not a time for song

Or singing. Imagine a Buddha, handmade,

Four meters high of compacted ash, the ash

Remnants of joss sticks that incarnated prayer.

With each breath, the whole slowly disintegrates.

With each footfall, ash shifts. The Buddha crumbles.

To face it, we efface it with our presence.

An infant will often turn away as if

Not to see is the same as not being seen.

There was fire, but God was not the fire.

SPIRIT FIGURES

A few clouds like coils of incense ash.

Jay-squabble.

The day-moon on its owl perch.

A lanky fox noses at a dead hawk:

Startles, backs away, circles uncertain.

That stalled moment in the trajectory

When an object neither rises nor