Augury

Poems

Eric Pankey

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781571319401
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

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

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Augury
• Speculation on Suffering
• Oracle Bones
• Speculation on a Star-Nursery
• Epiphenomenon
• Speculation on the History of Drawing
• Elegy for Cy Twombly
• The Fig
• Lost
• Dropped Stitches
• Ghost Ship or Union of the Torus and the Sphere
• At Sénanque Abbey
• Speculation on the Dark Ages
• Synopsis of a Battle
• Speculation on Melancholia
• Proofs and Refutations
• The Fragile Instant the Night Lights Up
• Reading Montale in Provence
• Speculation on the Little Ice Age
• Double Exposure
• Loose Leaves of Unpursued Speculations
• Speculation on the Present Tense
• This is the Hour
• Two Studies for a Parable
• Speculation on Immanence
• Remote Sensing
• Speculation on the Weight of Yesterday
• Noon Outside the City Wall
• Ars Poetica
• Speculation on the Absent God
• The Little Village
• Creation Myth
• Intelligence
• At the End of the Last Glacial Period
• High Pasture
• Burnt Offering
• Vespers
• Speculation on the Volcano
• Pinhole Photograph
• Another Time
• Speculation on Invisibility
• Speculation on Cause And Effect
• The Changeling
• Kansas City 1969
• Stasis in Motion or the Shower Scene in Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho Lasts a Half Hour
• Anemograph
• St. Louis Elegy
• The Friction between a String and Bow Calls Forth a Plaintive Hymn
• Study for the Fall of the Rebel Angels
• Speculation on the Afterlife
• Another Speculation on the Afterlife
• Souvenir De Voyage
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author