Apocrypha by Eric Pankey
"Apocrypha" by Eric Pankey is a poetry collection that delves into the complexities of faith and doubt, particularly within a Christian context. The title refers to biblical texts that are considered non-canonical, hinting at themes of questioning and reinterpretation. The book is organized into six sections—“Nocturnes,” “Illuminations,” “Depositions,” “Arguments,” “Departures,” and “Reconstructions”—each representing different facets of belief and skepticism. Pankey's poetry weaves rich Christian imagery throughout, reflecting a deep engagement with themes such as loss, atonement, and the search for meaning in a post-Christian landscape.
The speaker grapples with feelings of alienation from his childhood faith while still being haunted by its symbols and narratives. Pankey’s work challenges traditional interpretations of Christianity, often presenting a fragmented view that echoes a sense of longing for spiritual fulfillment. The elegiac tone captures a profound sense of nostalgia for lost certainties and beliefs. Throughout the collection, Pankey's exploration of iconic Christian elements raises complex questions about the nature of belief and the interplay between doubt and faith, ultimately suggesting that the remnants of spirituality continue to shape the speaker's existence.
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Apocrypha by Eric Pankey
First published: New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991
Genre: Poetry
Subgenre: Meditation and contemplation
Core issues: Catholics and Catholicism; doubt; faith; Jesus Christ; nature; reason
Overview
Eric Pankey was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1959, and after graduating from the University of Missouri-Columbia, he received an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. His first book, For the New Year (1984), won the Walt Whitman Award. He has received many awards, including a National Education Association fellowship and an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant. From his earliest poems, his work has been rich with Christian, particularly Catholic, imagery and thought; however, his is not standard-issue theology. Pankey explores Christianity in a lively way that makes it remain the background of his work while he is questioning and reinterpreting it.
Apocrypha as a title suggests his direction, as the Apocrypha are books that some believe to be inspired and some do not, so that the tales are not included in most Bibles. The book consists of six sections, “Nocturnes,” “Illuminations,” “Depositions,” “Arguments,” “Departures,” and “Reconstructions.” The sections can be taken as phases of faith and doubt, or as different perspectives on the same issues. “Nocturnes” features landscapes; “Illuminations” are discoveries, spiritual and otherwise; “Depositions” discusses Christ’s life and death; “Arguments” defines art; “Departures” are elegies; and “Reconstructions” are experimental revisions, or reinterpretations, of the world.
In Pankey’s vision, religion has a ghostly presence, and his poems are examinations of these ghosts and attempts to express and explain them. The speaker in Apocrypha is alienated from his childhood religion but cannot banish it entirely; its emblems and its vocabulary are part of him. Indeed, the titles and the subjects suggest a collection of traditionally religious poetry: “Vespers,” “Triptych,” “Exegesis,” “Icon,” and “Te Deum Laudamus.” However, the poetry is anything but traditional: It searches, revises, and probes the Christian story. “The Allegory of Doubt” seems to crystallize the position in that the speaker “looks to edges” to see the two visions, “disturbed choppy air of mirage.” The sure faith of the past and the current doubts of the speaker are represented in the scene as a fragmented image, as two scenes that do not quite align. The speaker leaves without submission or dismissal, but with a certain reluctance:
As he turns to leave, he moves his hands
These poems ask questions, often deep questions with no answers; however, the Bible stories and Christian mind-set—Eden, the Crucifixion and the tomb, even the parables—are a major presence in them. There is no getting away from Christianity and no yielding to it. Guilt, atonement, contrition, and submission dominate the poetry, but often as queries. The questions are often hidden in the poems: Who is Jesus? What is the Resurrection? What has faith to offer us? Yet the scenes and images of the poems presuppose a deep and lasting engagement with the Christian faith, one that doubt cannot undo. A fundamental sense of loss—of people, childhood, certainties, and faith—dominates this collection. The elegiac tone echoes that of Wallace Stevens, who pursued a similar course in his own work and whom Pankey admires.
The opening poem to Apocrypha, which does not fall into one of the six groups, expresses sorrow and longing. The poem, “Prayer,” reflects on loss, or “the fugitive/ released as easily as a breath” and ends “Sweet,/ Sweet anchor, how long/ Your hook held.”
Pankey’s poetry is in part a search for a lost metaphysic. Pankey’s work, like that of the poet Stevens, is permeated by a search for the truly spiritual. Stevens walked a short way down a number of spiritual paths before electing in old age to join the Catholic Church, which he did on his deathbed. Pankey has stayed with Christian ideas and images in his search. Apocrypha provides a close examination of what was once for him the container of the spiritual, the Church. He painstakingly reviews all the images and events of Catholicism, perhaps still looking for hooks.
Christian Themes
One of the major themes in Apocrypha is the conflict among the grand narrative of Christianity, historical facts, and the observances of ordinary life. This work is defined by, even bound by, the most Christian of thoughts and images: icon, Bible, church music, and church art. Yet the speaker does not find the items of faith to be fruitful in the production of faith. They deceive him; they turn into other things. There is a sense that the speaker has in some way been let down by his faith; things that once were filled with joy are empty. The speaker is haunted by his lost faith and its forms.
The book is one of three by Pankey that explore the nature and difficulty of the Christian faith, the other two being The Late Romances (1997) and Cenotaph (2000). In an interview, Pankey once stated that he thinks of the three as panels in a triptych, rather than as works in a sequence. Each panel examines a particular perspective on the Christianity that molds and haunts him and examines its promises and its failure to fulfill them. The poems together suggest a spiritual vacancy in the speaker’s life, a nostalgia for lost belief, and an unwillingness to turn completely away from the past.
The doubt in the poems seems locked into step with an unwillingness to let Christianity go. The poems begin with Christian images and sometimes with the baggage of literary allusion. For instance, “The Tomb in Palestine” suggests the famous skeptical Stevens poem “Sunday Morning”; at one point, the woman of the poem, hovering uneasily at the edge of faith, is assured that she will do well to accept the world as enough and realize that “the tomb in Palestine” is not, as she had once believed, a “porch” or threshold of “spirits lingering.” Instead it is “the grave of Jesus.” When Pankey invokes the tomb—that of Jesus as seen by Stevens—he finds questions, not answers. Less conclusive than the Stevens poem, “The Tomb in Palestine” raises some of the same issues. However, it seems that the answer given by Stevens, “Death is the mother of beauty,” is not quite enough for Pankey. He goes back again and again to the images, the stories, and the sacraments. Pankey’s version of the Catholic sacramental vision is different from that of most poets, who tend to find the sacramental in the elements of daily life, thus endowing the normal with the sacred. Pankey tends to start with the sacred and deconstruct it. Yet after all the demythologizing, something stubbornly remains. In this work, the residue, or remains, of Christianity are still indeterminate in nature. The last poem in Apocrypha, “Eschatology,” suggests directions for new explorations:
It is not the lure of a past,
The poem concludes
Go on. The mockingbird’s song and the lily,
Few poets struggle so hard with Christianity, and few have internalized it so deeply. In poems of skill and craft, Pankey describes the Christian in a post-Christian age. His poems examine the gaps and blurs that the microscope finds in the Christian fabric, but they cannot turn away from it or toss it aside.
Sources for Further Study
Collins, Floyd. “Body and Soul: Three Visionary Poets.” Gettysburg Review 13, no. 2 (Summer, 2000): 314-329. Study of contemporary visionary poetry precedes Apocrypha but provides a fine introduction to Pankey’s thematic preoccupations.
Collins, Floyd. “Mythic Resonances.” Gettysburg Review 11, no. 2 (Summer, 1998): 344-361. Explores Pankey’s work together with that of others. Gives a sense of how he uses stories.
Gurley, James. “Apocrypha by Eric Pankey, Mercy by Kathleen Pierce, Riddles for a Naked Sailor by Mary Azrael, and Looking for Luck by Maxine Kumin.” Poet Lore 87, no. 3 (Fall, 1992): 53. A review that sets Apocrypha in the context of other concurrently published poetry books.
Pankey, Eric. “The Form of Concentration.” The Iowa Review 19, no. 2 (Summer, 1998): 175-187. Study of Charles Wright that gives much insight into Pankey’s own poetics.