Augury

“To evoke enigma, place two objects next to one another and step away,” writes Pankey (Crow Work) in his 12th collection, making the creation of these numinous poems sound remarkably easy. Yet each ethereal image he weaves into his work is delicately curated, whittled down through his attention to sound. In one poem, for example, readers see and hear the “Bladderwrack in a backwash of waves.” The collection is peppered with poems featuring titles beginning with “Speculation on...,” wherein Pankey ponders such topics as the afterlife, melancholia, and volcanos. And the collection closes with a 26-part prose poem that evokes the richness of the French countryside and an ancient landscape drawn from a mixture of legend and dream. Pankey’s poems destabilize as they straddle time and place, and he looks askance at the narrow way in which language is often viewed. “The purpose of a well-made tool is that it eases and lightens work,” he writes in his wry “Ars Poetica.” But words often seem to do the opposite; he also observes “How easily words un-name/ Slip like skin from a blanched peach.” For Pankey, language expands beyond words to the cave paintings at Lascaux and the scribblings of painter Cy Twombly, “tossed owl bones” and the “dust-narrative of loose snow.” (Nov.)