It is an item of lore, frequently invoked, that Wallace Stevens, when he negotiated his first, 1923 book contract with Alfred Knopf, proposed The Grand Poem: Preliminary Minutiae as the title for what, ultimately, was published as Harmonium. If Stevens’ title strikes us now as the more apt, then likely our lore vaunts the market-exigencies that carried the day. Eric Pankey’s first book, For The New Year, won a contest judged by Mark Strand, whose editor at Atheneum, Harry Ford, took on the younger author (a second book, Heartwood, appeared in 1988), and brought him along to Knopf, which published three additional Pankey volumes over a decade. Reading Apocrypha in 1991, I had no idea that it was the first "panel in a tryptich of books," but well before the dust-jacket of the third panel, Cenotaph, informed me, the issue, not inconsiderable in Pankey’s case, had already been raised of just what it is one is reading when one reads him, at what moment in the literary process form becomes apprehensible, concrete: word, phrase, line, sentence, stanza, poem, series, sequence, book, tryptich, The Grand Poem? Slightly disingenuous dust-jacket blurb to the contrary, this question will not be sloughed off on the Publisher, as lore likes to do with Stevens, Knopf, and The Grand Poem. For Harry Ford is dead, Knopf poetry has made its pop culture move, Pankey’s new book, Oracle Figures, is out from a small press, Ausable, and it’s remarkably consistent in range and tone with the rest of his work.
           Admittedly, it is just this limited range and deeply quiet tone that draws us to Pankey’s poems. He is a gifted aphorist ("The only bridge across Wind River is the wind"; "It was only today, I admit, that I noticed the anagram Eros in the rose"), and within the range of American rime that tunes to the lapsed possibility of ecstatic experience, his ear insurpassably absorbs, as his craft registers, a self-awareness capable of forcing long-held-separate modes of poetic inquiry into integral play: "When did the mere sublime fall out of favor? | When did the ineffable lose the sacred? | | A spider bridges the gap between two oaks. | A black snake slips through a cowlick of tall grass. | I map the coordinates, take ragtag notes." The notes may be ragtag, but the guildsmanship richly crossbreeds habits of attention:

If I squint my eyes I can see the floating world where all forms are born.
The white of the birch, the winter’s only green, is whiter than hoarfrost.
I cast a hexagram of six broken lines. I cheated. Threw again.
I threw the I Ching yesterday. It said there’d be thunder at the well.
The word translated as "coaxed" means literally "as fingers change strings."
If I squint my eyes I can see the floating world where all forms are born.

The dazzle of these six broken lines is in discovering all the ways in which their "brokenness" rhymes. End-stopped, triple-stopped, double; the subjunctive mood modulated seamlessly into a present-tense narration which tricks us into failing to notice we’ve shifted to a past ("I cheated"); a citation alluding to the Chinese that suggests to us the ideogramic character of the lines we’re reading; only that they be raveled again, by a gloss (though not of the allusion, or at least not apparently), and by a refrain that holds in tension our apprehension of the lines’ ideogramic character. The observation may be generalized: there is a deep, cunning joy to the craft of these poems.
           We may quickly proceed to the limits of Pankey’s craft: in many poems, throughout now six books, we find a speaker watching, as if sitting on a porch, a landscape of coastline, creek, benighted field, rural road, lantern-light, whiskey tumbler, and snuffed match, in which very little would seem to be happening, were not each of these "coordinates"–as the poet himself characterizes them in a poem by that title–symbols sifted through an exquisitely sensitive linguistic instrument. The speaker is describing what he sees, but Pankey’s awareness in and around words’ theurgic associations, wherein an occult magic is divined in the most ordinary investiture of word-meaning, makes the descriptions a highly compressed, richly textured, reflection on poetic craft, Christian faith, and necessary doubt. In orthodox terms, that necessary doubt is the postulant’s doubt, not in his claim, but in himself, his own capacity to live up to what is entailed in giving oneself back on the body of Christ. Pankey’s title, Oracle Figures, acknowledges that poetry, as a craft, and not just the oracular telling, radicalizes, through its tampering with linguistic materials, that doubt upon which Christ is said to have based his own revelation of a church. At his best, Pankey shows us how craft mastery becomes the Christian’s self-doubt, for while the work’s range is limited by its craft tradition–obviously, since there will be more than one–Pankey sees craft as an "augur," as he admits in the book’s finest metaphysical ode, "Final Thought": "What I have argued thus far is but a treatise | On the owl and the moon." Here the owl figures as poetry’s investigative skill, while the moon is that "inscrutability" which calls skill out, revealing "the hairline crack" between material and spiritual realms.
          To be crafty is to be, in precisely an etymological sense, aware of both the theurgic and orthodox associations of a symbol. In the title poem, a series of twelve lyric fragments, or stations, Pankey stages the struggle with doubt in–the mode is frequent in his work–an eclogue:

The stars seen through the wire grid of the cage
Are what they are, and the cold, a dead language.
The depth of field and the field of vision, the dream
And its driftage, the dark’s one garment dragged
Through the distant olive, are scribbled and hatched.
Doubt is part of the process of inquiry,
As is the single star downcast. As is the cricket.
As is the grass. As is the milk on a lynx’s tongue.

To paraphrase a bit: We are not told whether the stars are Christ’s children or the sky seen from the doubter’s porch, nor whether the cage is the speaker’s solitude or the prison-house of language. These things "are what they are," and need not figure, i.e., be metaphorical–yet, if so, the speaker grows "cold," and the cold is "a dead language." Pankey’s doubt bothers between accepting words as they rest on Christ’s instantiation, or wobble between the instant and its occult models of elucidation. To accept uncritically an occult model is never Pankey’s lure; however, the binary, in all its values, both coerced ("dragged through") and given ("the dream | and its driftage"), is to the creation ("hatched") as the doubter’s "scribble" is to himself: an inescapable legacy. The whole world gives itself up, gives itself over, and "the single star downcast"–that is, Christ on the Cross–is no more exemplary than the cricket, the grass or "the milk on the lynx’s tongue." What’s at stake here is the exemplary character of that tradition which perceives the perhaps compromised possibility of ecstatic experience as being most truly embodied in the "fictive space"–as the volume’s first poem calls it, after Stevens–of language.
           If "doubt is part of the process of inquiry," and poetic craft the inquiry’s augur, then the craftsman’s legacy ("scribbling" is his cocky-modest self-ironizing) is inescapable because he works out of a conviction in his own capacity difficult to budge. It draws in his relation to the father–present in both autobiographical accounts of the writer’s family, and in the pulled down son of God ceaselessly immanent in poetic imagery, i.e., in the given world:

My father stepped off the path.
Then my brother. I followed.

Even then I was a collector:
A quail feather, a bolus,
Chips of fool’s gold,
Milkweed down, poplar seed.

I knew then as now
The tangible world,
The demands of nostalgia,
The cosmology’s concentric circles.

In previous books the legacy narrated here wasn’t always so allegorized; the middle section of Cenotaph (1999), for example, was a daring autobiographical sequence, not entirely successful, that depicted the father, fallen into alcoholism, against the backdrop of Pankey’s Cold War suburban childhood, as well as the Confessional mode of that era’s poetry–a nostalgia in at least one case ("Cold War") too demanding to renew our sense of Pankey’s historical exemplification. It works just as well for me when Pankey passes beyond his two primary craft coordinates, a kind of Wintersian animism (its stoical control often scored in syllabics) altogether worthy of the father as an image-making practice, crossed with the crisis poem, or shore-line loco-descriptive ode, of Stevens, by way of Bishop; and, away from these, into daybook-entries like the following, from "The Constellations of Autumn": "Too much whiskey these days. Late in getting up. I lie and watch the western hills. The sun all haze. Read the poems of my teachers and go back to bed." That bit of self-mythologizing seems to me just right, for the fallenness of the drunkard into depression and of the craftsmen addicted to his endlessly vaunted models becomes another allegory in which the "father stepped off the path . . . [and] I followed." It is an allegory of Christian doubt, ironic because our identification with the waylaid father entails the need to pull him down to earth, in sacrifice and redemption.
           Oracle Figures distills the craftsman’s penchant for exemplification, with 28 poems to Cenotaph’s 57; and while the locale has changed only a little, the tone is less mired in crisis than it was in Cenotaph, with its autobiographical mid-life, and insistently recurring sectional development. Pankey has become so adept within his crisis that at times the joy in eloquence squints with the crowsfeet of the damned: "Ten thousand worlds in the eye of a deerfly | And I slap it against my thigh nonetheless. | So much for the multiplicities of awe." A post-coital ode set on the Piazza San Spirito in Florence is lovely, but nothing in it pleases us so as to find the word "shim," used to name the closed matchbook placed beneath a leg to level a table. The augur such a doubter’s craft again and again pricks us with raises the question of apprehensible form; for while we’re encouraged to notice the levels (the cut line, the witty phrase, the shimmering word), and in every volume there are poems that most clearly articulate the problem ("The Coordinates," "A Hemisphere of Stars," "Final Thought"), Pankey understands "I was part of the conspiracy: || Each detail was made to equal the whole." This suggests that, for Pankey, no less than for the most avid vanguardist, the occasion for his craft is truly a crisis of repetition, the coordinates always failing to become the man. It is here, too, that we see how Pankey’s craft coordinates indeed limit the range within which his Christian humanism allows him to work: it is on the word in particular that craft-worker fails to become the man. What does the word permit? How much world gets in? I suspect that Pankey is too honest in tending poetry’s care for the word to have use of Robert Graves’ boast to Robert Duncan, when Duncan visited the postulant of the White Goddess in 1955: "I told Ezra Pound poetry is not an art!" But Graves’ boast strikes me as a "coaxing [. . . literally ‘as fingers change strings’]" of another, if not crafty, kind.