Reliquaries

Originally drafted over a six-month period, the five-line sections of each poem in Reliquaries were written as walking meditations in the hills and woods above and along the banks of the Occoquan River in Virginia. The mind in these poems wanders beyond Virginia to arctic zones, the distances and openness of the American Midwest where the poet grew up, and overseas to Europe, and takes up subjects including the death of family and friends, faith and doubt, beauty and the sublime, philosophy and art. This book is Pankey’s most expansive, accessible, and wide-ranging to date. Reliquaries is written in long lines that, like Whitman’s, catalog and collect, arrange out of the scattershot an order—even if only a momentary order.