The Pear as One Example by Eric PankeyAusable Press, 2008

Smart, allusive: the first poem is called “To Olga Knipper,” and includes a reference to May 25, 1901—the day of her wedding to Chekhov. The poem is like a letter from Chekhov’s point of view: it’s quiet and beautiful (images of flowers, birds, rain) and makes me want to read Chekhov’s actual letters to Knipper. Later, there are quotations from Agnes Martin, Richard Serra. These poems are full of art, and full of nature: Pankey writes about the beauty of things, beauty in things, which makes this book especially pleasing to me. In “Reasons of Ice,” Pankey writes: “I would like to hold this still world,/ if the world were a thing to be held” (p 10). This and many of Pankey’s poems are wonderfully wintry: ice and bare branches. “All I am left with now/is detail,” Pankey writes, later in “Reasons of Ice,” and it’s that detail that I like best about these poems, the detail of “For the New Year,” with its lines about food, light, love (“This light after the body’s/pleasure. Always this light.” (p 14)), or “Snow on Ash Wednesday,” with its “chirr[ing]” pigeons and “slow heavy snowflakes” (pp 34-35). The poems from Apocrypha, with their Christian references, had me looking things up (the phrase “when the wood is green,” a diptych by Rogier van der Weyden): in the process of that looking-up, I read a review that compares some of Pankey’s phrasing to Gerard Manley Hopkins, and I can see it in these lines from “Diptych”: “what shade blocked and what light whelmed/Glared, then grated, declined durably, darkly,/Until the frame of a diptych remained” (p 56). Later, there are other lines I like, and whole poems that are wonderful: lines like “Luck, like hope, is always hollow-boned” (p 62), and poems like “Fool’s Gold,” the quiet grace of it, and “Santo Spirito,” the same. I love this, from “How to Sustain the Visionary Mode”: “Let the rain rain all day on the slate, a province of rain, gray as the stone no longer quarried in these hills, gray as the pigeons tucked in the eaves” (p 125). I love, late in the book, the pieces of overheard conversations worked into the poems: the eavesdropping-in-museums lines in “The Narration of Rain” and “A Bit of Gold Leaf.”