This image is the cover for the book Owl of Minerva

Owl of Minerva

A Walt Whitman Award–winning poet seeks the spiritual within everyday physical objects in this luminous collection.

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, Eric 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.

“Pankey remains one of our leading practitioners of the metaphysical poem.” —C. Dale Young, author of Prometeo

Eric Pankey

Eric Pankey is the author of many collections of poetry, most recently Augury. He is the recipient of a Walt Whitman Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Library of Virginia Literary Award. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Field, Gettysburg Review, and Poetry Daily, as well as numerous anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2011 (edited by Kevin Young). He is currently a professor of English and Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University. He lives in Fairfax, Virginia.

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