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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.
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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.
"The cenotaph is the perfect figure for these 'elegiac variations' by Eric Pankey -- variations of elegance, even stateliness, that stand for qualities of craft and metaphysical insight that have become the poet's standard. Pankey is one of the quiet poets, given to the graces of beautiful, rendered writing burdened by the consciousness that words are never enough. Thus Pankey is one of the honest poets." --Stanley Plumly
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