The pear as one example

the long version

This book offers a generous selection of Pankey's previous seven collections as well a book-length group of new poems. For Pankey, language is a means of divination, of augury, of reading the world--the refracted past, the ephemeral present, the mutable future. While these meditative poems are deeply philosophical, their subject is the world of things. In these poems, he explores the world by way of the body--the body as a marker of time, the body as a vessel of grief, the body as an ecstatic radiant filament. Like an alchemist, Pankey takes the elemental and transmutes it into mythic. -- Publisher's website.