In Not Yet Transfigured, Eric Pankey extends his poetic oeuvre in ways simultaneously foreseeable and fresh. Seeing itself becomes a metaphysical activity in these poems, whether the object in view is the unmediated natural world or a work of art. The influence of poetic masters in the meditative mode such as Yves Bonnefoy, Philippe Jaccottet, and Charles Wright is evident in Pankey's latest collection. Concluding with a major new prose poem, "Landscape in Theory: A Meditation," Not Yet Transfigured is an essential volume for every lover of contemporary poetry.
Eric Pankey is the author of fourteen collections of poems and a book of essays. His work has been supported by fellowships from The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Ingram Merrill Foundation, and The Brown Foundation. He is the Heritage Chair in writing at George Mason University.
"[Pankey's] wisdom, sometimes sidelong, sometimes direct, both knows and feels." - Jane Hirshfield
"In this age of both religious extremism and cynical atheism, Eric Pankey's poems gleam with authenticity. From his earliest work, his abiding interest has been in probing the place where human consciousness confronts what lies outside of our understanding." - Chase Twichell
"Eric Pankey's sensibility is an unerringly generous one: he is always willing to step first onto unsteady ground, to test it for those who might follow." - Mary Szybist
"Pankey writes poems that give us back, if not the world, our relation to it—where we can learn from what resists understanding, where even withholding reveals, where the future includes all the past, and though the mind might be obliterated by the light it seeks, it seeks it still, in the ruins and in the orchard." - Dan Beachy-Quick