{"id":243,"date":"2008-12-02T21:43:51","date_gmt":"2008-12-03T02:43:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books\/?p=243"},"modified":"2008-12-02T21:43:51","modified_gmt":"2008-12-03T02:43:51","slug":"the-pear-as-one-example-by-eric-pankeyausable-press-2008","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/the-pear-as-one-example-by-eric-pankeyausable-press-2008\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pear as One Example by Eric PankeyAusable Press, 2008"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>. 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<\/em> 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<\/em>, with their Christian references, had me looking things up (the phrase “when the wood is green,” a diptych by Rogier van der Weyden<\/a>): in the process of that looking-up, I read a review that compares some of Pankey’s phrasing to Gerard Manley Hopkins<\/a>, 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.” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}