The gifted author of Sure Shot (about which The Harvard Review wrote, "Erica Funkhouser has written an important book and is on her way to becoming an important poet") has now composed her third volume, including lyrics that conjure up a sisterly view of childhood, a narrative poem that brings to life a city under siege in civil war, and a group of poignant shorter poems dramatizing love, pain, and history. Much anthologized, Erica Funkhouser's dramatic poems are models of their kind: "Funkhouser breathes new life into the legends of Sacagawea, Louisa May Alcott, and Annie Oakley . . . but her most moving poems are those in her own voice" (Library Journal). To get the shape right one must be capricious as a twig - crave sunlight and audience and leave things open to the rain - respecting, at the same time, the solemnity of the whole tree. Certain irrevocable decisions must be lived with. - From "Pruning"
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Joyce Carol Oates counts herself among Erica Funkhouser's admirers, pointing to Funkhouser's "unusual clarity of vision and language." The real strength of The Actual World is Funkhouser's dramatic poems. In it she has dusted off and jump-started the legends of Louisa May Alcott and Annie Oakley, among others. Funkhouser demonstrates her ability to imaginatively project herself into a situation and carry the reader with her. The voice she has found in "The Dog" is especially appealing: "I love how he rows his fingers / the wrong way through the fur on my back, / pulling and growling and lifting his heels / as if he were the one being pleased."
From Library Journal
"The actual world" is the poems themselves. Funkhouser writes with the clarity of Wendell Berry. Her poems address things that often are overlooked: a shed, a henhouse, a hayloft, a window, a log, a gargoyle. The poems find their voice through inanimate and animate objects. The speaker stands as a witness to the light that "spill[s] over like chrome/ onto the fur and tar and fear/ of the world below." The poems testify to the world's destructive reality. The speaker learns in "The Woman" that "there are so many ways out of this world,/ the city has taught us,/ most of them brutal and random." The speaker realizes that "there is only this old way in." The actual world of the speaker resembles the pain and anguish of childbirth, of which eventually she "welcome[s] the weight." These poems show a willingness to accept the world for what it is. They do it though with a clear voice and vivid imagery. This is one of the best volumes of poetry since Philip Levine's Simple Truth (LJ 11/1/94). Highly recommended.?Tim Gavin, The Episcopal Academy, Merion, Pa.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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A Spellbounding World,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Actual World: Poems (Hardcover)
Funkhouser delivers a fasinating book of fantasy and reality. A trip that you won't want to find an exit out of. Her words will set you reading the book over and over.
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