Pursuit: Poems [Paperback]

Erica Funkhouser (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 17, 2004

Erica Funkhouser's poetry finds in the natural world a leaping-off point for all types of human inquiry: physical, intellectual, and spiritual. Her fourth collection, Pursuit, gives us poems devoted to the details of living, poems that illustrate how a domestic moment may turn suddenly erotic or how a wave of grief may open inexplicably into triumph. Whether driven by elemental need or sublime desire, the inhabitants of these thought-provoking poems engage in seeking of every kind.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This careful, reader-friendly fourth outing from Funkhouser (The Actual World) makes stark and honest, if unadventurous, lyric from birds, plants, suburbs and paintings, then turns its attention to well-told stories in verse. Funkhouser works to capture loves and losses in poems like "When She Lies Down at Night" ("She tries to let the loneliness be another body"), but she finds more congenial subjects in the mammals and game fowl that wander across her territory: "If you must possess something," she says of a woodcock, "own it as she does her scrubby acre." The clipped lines of "Collecting Hair" show how and why men's cut hair keeps deer from nibbling trees. Funkhouser's "plain New England field," as she observes it, ought to please devotees of Mary Oliver or Elizabeth Spires, as will the handful of poems set in Renaissance Holland. It's toward the end of the volume, however, that Funkhouser (who teaches at MIT) escapes her various models. The verse-essay "The Seven Friendships" makes up for a lack of formal interest with wisdom about what holds people together. "Casualty," a five-page short story in verse, remembers how a friend's troubled brother was found dead in Seattle: "`He disappeared now and then, but who doesn't?'" Funkhouser's craft and decorum will allow readers to see clear, sensitive characters.

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Review

"This new collection confirms the talent of a rare, probing poet." --John Taylor, POETRY

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (February 17, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618381872
• ISBN-13: 978-0618381876
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6.2 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,093,657 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)