Title: Crow-work : poems /
Authors: Pankey, Eric, 1959-
Year: 2015
Subjects: American poetry
Abstract: "What is a song but a snare to capture the moment?" Eric Pankey asks in his new collection, Crow-Work. This central question drives Pankey's ekphrastic exploration of the moment where emotion and energy flood a work of art. Through subjects as diverse as Brueghel'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. "--
Contents: Ash -- Spirit Figures -- When We Meet On That Beautiful Shore -- The Book of an Hour -- Working in the Dark -- Crow-Work -- The Problem with the First Person -- Study for Salome Dancing Before Herod -- Caravaggio's Severed Heads -- My Brother's Insomnia -- My Brother's Ghost -- To Open the Body -- Two-Part Lamentation -- Fragments From an Excavation -- Dark Was the Night -- June Depression ome Remedy -- The Incredulity of Saint Thomas -- Depth of Field -- Beneath Venus -- Preparatory Drawing for an Unfinished Triptych -- The Tended -- Ars Poetica -- The Original Scriptures No Longer Exist, Merely Translations of Translations of Corrupted Texts -- The Imagined Space Beyond -- The Dictates of Gravity -- Still Life -- Hermetica -- Objects in Girogio Morandi's Studio -- The Language of Flowers -- Passage -- Venetian Light -- Essay On Idleness -- The Other Side of the Argument -- Return of the Exile -- "The Beautiful Gardener" or "The Creation of Eve" -- Rehearsal for an Elegy -- The Poppy -- Palimpsest of Chalked Equations and Erasures -- Fragment -- Autumn Drawing -- Bone Fragments -- If We Never Meet Again This Side of Heaven.