Poetry. This book-length sequence of poems combines the spiritual and sometimes hermetic quest of Pankey's short lyric poems of the 1990s with his more directly narrative, plain-spoken poems of the 1980s. Like a reliquary, each poem not only holds shards of memory, relics of the past, but each poem is a meditation upon the complexity of memory, written in long lines that, like Whitman's, catalog and collect, arrange out of the scattershot an order.

Author City: Fairfax, VA USA

Eric Pankey is the author of seven previous books: For the New Year, which won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, Heartwood, Apocypha, The Late Romances, Cenotaph, which won the Poetry Award from the Library of Virginia, Oracle Figures and Reliquaries. His work has been supported by fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. A professor of English at George Mason University, he lives with his wife and daughter in Fairfax, Virginia.