"Pankey writes poems that give us back, if not the world, our relation
to it." --DAN BEACHY-QUICK
Taking its name from the Roman goddess of wisdom and her companion bird,
Owl of Minerva turns astonishingly precise attention to the physical
world, scouring it for evidence of the spiritual as the poet travels
through such places as Appalachia, New England, Venice, Spain, the
Caribbean, and the American Midwest. Along the way, Pankey ponders
mortality, religious narratives and iconography, the continued press of
childhood on the present, and the simultaneous violence and beauty of
the natural world.
At the book's core are three ambitious poems titled "The Complete List
of Everything," which together offer an extended vision of American
longing and connection--as well as a window into the sort of compendium
of images and moments a sustained devotion to poetry can yield. "The
hope was to construct // A coherent totality of meaning from odds / And
ends," Pankey writes, and so much of this book is about the difficult
work of constructing meaning from the available material all around us.
This book is an extraordinary example of lyric-meditative journaling--a
large and profound collection by a brilliant poet writing at the height
of his powers.
