Starred review from December 15, 2014
A seasoned but humble craftsman, Pankey (Dismantling the Angel), whose 1984 collection For the New Year won the Walt Whitman Award, searches through works of art and our collective history for a “stark clarity.” His ekphrastic dig through sketches and detritus, through the play of light and dark, is a sonically-precise thrill to read: “The mind is a vertiginous space: The world beyond it anchored in mere shadow.” The collection teases out a murky past discolored and tarnished by flawed memory, but one that lives on in the evolutions of art like a kind of palimpsest. “Unwilled,” Pankey writes, “the present leaks into the past, tinctures it./ A poem is not a séance and yet how quickly the shades crowd in// Expecting elegy and lamentation.” These shades or shadows haunt a journey down a path lit with a sputtering ember. In Pankey’s world, night is always about to fall, “a mirror fails to glean,” and darkness does not signal rest, but “a long portage through a forest.” Darkness is exploration, but the darkness is also depression, something that Pankey has struggled with throughout his life, which he describes as an “alloy of lead and slumber.” In this wonderful exploration of the emotional power of art, Pankey wonders “Who drew the map I hold, made of shadow pulp,/ Years before I wore down the marked path I follow?”