“If only words were salt—soluble, savory, vital, electric,” Eric Pankey writes in “Variations on Hadrian’s Animula,” one of many virtuosic works in Vestiges: Notes, Responses, and Essays 1988 – 2018. In this diverse collection of lyrical prose, Pankey assays his personal-poetic history with passion, brilliance, and grace. He considers the works of many great poets—Dickinson, Stevens, Donne, Hopkins, Merwin, Justice, Levis, and Lorca, to name just a few—invoking them as teachers and guides....

In his eighteenth collection of poetry,Eric Pankey continues his forty-year investigation into how and what one can know in this world and beyond it. The poet, Jane Hirshfield, says about his poetry, “Eric Pankey is a poet of precise observation and startling particularities. His wisdom, sometimes sidelong, sometimes direct, both knows and feels. The soundcraft is superb, the modes of investigation by turns lyrical, surreal, meditative, allegorical, direct-speaking, and allusive.”P...

With Dismantling the Angel, Eric Pankey shows once more why he is one of the American poets I admire most. These are such deeply moving, humane, and thoughtful poems.” —KEVIN PRUFER