Bøker i Illuminations: A American Poetics-serien

The essays in Sudden Eden explore the ways in which the memory of Paradise, or experience of the paradisiacal, has shaped canons of experimental writing from the late Middle Ages through to the present day. Keyed to figures as various as Dante and Beckett, Thomas Traherne and Barbara Guest, Sudden Eden proposes a new constellation of Metaphysical, Symbolist, and Postmodern lights-a single, continuous Heaven. DONALD REVELL is the author of fifteen collections of poetry, most recently of The English Boat (2018) and Drought-Adapted Vine (2015), both from Alice James books, Revell has also published six volumes of translations from the French, including Apollinaire's Alcools, Rimbaud's A Season in Hell, Laforgue's Last Poems, and Verlaine's Songs without Words. His critical writings have been collected as Essay: A Critical Memoir; The Art of Attention; and Invisible Green: Selected Prose. Winner of the PEN USA Translation Award and two-time winner of the PEN USA Award for Poetry, he has also won The Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Prize and is a former Fellow of the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations. Additionally, he has been twice awarded Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Having previously taught at the universities of Alabama, Denver, Iowa, Missouri, Tennessee and Utah, Donald Revell is currently Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

"If only words were salt-soluble, savory, vital, electric," Eric Pankey writes in "Variations on Hadrian's Animula," one of many virtuosic works in Vestiges: Notes, Responses, and Essays 1988 - 2018. In this diverse collection of lyrical prose, Pankey assays his personal-poetic history with passion, brilliance, and grace. He considers the works of many great poets-Dickinson, Stevens, Donne, Hopkins, Merwin, Justice, Levis, and Lorca, to name just a few-invoking them as teachers and guides. As much about language as the unutterable, sight as the unseen, Vestiges is a gorgeous, vital collection. -Danielle Cadena Deulen, author of The RiotsVestiges: Notes, Responses, and Essays 1988 - 2018 maps the mind of one of our best lyrical poets and thinkers. In these concise and nuanced works of prose, Eric Pankey meditates on such subjects as spiritual faith, the poetic image, memory, language, duende, and silence in poetry. Pankey is a quester, a searcher for truth, so it's no surprise that in Vestiges he eschews nailed-down arguments and grand arrivals, prioritizing the question and the journey towards "the unsayable, the untouchable . . . the unknowable." He reminds us that mystery and uncertainty are not weaknesses, but essential aspects of a life lived richly in both art and faith. -Brian Barker, author of Vanishing ActsEric Pankey muses, "What is the divine? How is it made manifest? Where does it reside?" Revisiting the lyric impulse in a post-religious generation, Vestiges ponders the Romantic lyric subject in light of postmodern skepticism with allusions to Biblical contexts, illuminating the phenomenon of wonder in a material yet epistemologically unstable world: "In the lyric, language is both the ritual and the sacrifice at the moment's altar." Guided by an inner compass of memory and desire, psalms and lamentations, restoration and revival, we unearth in ourselves "not a spark, but a splinter of God in each of us, inflamed, working its way to the surface." This book, a revitalizing act of faith and inspiration, is a marvelous gift to us. -Karen An-hwei Lee, author of Phyla of JoyERIC PANKEY is also the author of ten collections of poetry and Professor of English and the Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.