Augury: Poems

By Eric Pankey

From award-winning poet and author of Crow-Work, a collection exploring the presence of the divine in the seemingly ordinary.

The ancient Romans practiced augury, reading omens in bird’s flight patterns. In the poems of Augury, revelation is found in nature’s smallest details: a lizard’s quick movements, a tree scarred by lighting, the white curve of a snail’s shell. Here the sensory world and the imagined one collide in unexpected and wonderful ways, as Pankey scrutinizes the physical for meaning, and that meaning for truth.

With uncommon grace, each of Pankey’s precise lyrics advances our shared ontological questions and expresses our deepest contradictions. In a world of mystery, should we focus on finding meaning or creating it? How can the known—and the unknown— be captured in language?

Augury is a masterful and magical collection from a poet of stirring intelligence, “a book of stones unstitched from the wolf’s belly.”

Praise for Augury

“A darkly luminous book by a poet at the height of his considerable poetic power.” —Kathy Fagan, author of Moving & St. Rage

“This is a book I will keep close at hand, alongside the best work of Montale, Dickinson, Celan, and Stevens. This is a book one will turn to again and again.” —Rebecca Dunham, author of Cold Pastoral

“Each ethereal image he weaves into his work is delicately curated, whittled down through his attention to sound. . . . Pankey’s poems destabilize as they straddle time and place, and he looks askance at the narrow way in which language is often viewed.” —Publishers Weekly

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 14, 2017
• ISBN: 9781571319401

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

AUGURY

Inside the camera obscura,

a cloud,

Or the image of a cloud, grows darker.

The past warps, curls back round to touch the present.

Is it the spit and clay on the blind man’s eyes

Or the little spell of words that returns sight?

Look, they said.

So I looked. But I saw nothing.

A book of moths. A book of sand.

A book of stones unstitched from the wolf’s belly.

Shot through with light,

a book of blank pages.

The solution embodies yet keeps hidden

All dissolved within it,

keeps the hermetic

Hemmed in, the secret secret a bit longer.

The Geiger counter’s tick-tick like an old clock’s.

Foreign voices on the shortwave,