It is this conjunction of the celestial and terrestrial that mark his poems and provide them with balance and bearing. With his choice of title, though, he designates as his primary theme death, and, more importantly, the human desire for commemoration and memorial that is coupled with it. Favoring firmly maneuverable couplets or tercets, Pankey exhibits a remarkable ability to draw precise and compelling images from his topics rapidly and evidently at will. They leap from the poems like sparks from a welder's torch. It is here that he announces himself, makes clear his astounding ability to fashion a universe of his own choosing.
Words are but an entrance.
Words, despite their frailty, can be marshalled by an authentic poet to conjure larger intuitive possibilities than they might possess in clumsier hands. This is an almost medieval conceit wherein a single body is made to mirror the divine cosmos. Rather than acknowledge a universalizing harmony in nature as did Alexander Pope or a reassuring pantheistic divinity as did William Wordsworth, Pankey formulates a more complex place for it in human experience. A barbed flame on a resinous wick. There is also a sadness profoundly ingrained in these poems.