The Knot Garden: Poems

by Allison Funk

"Allison Funk in a single poem moves within very few words from a line that is dew-like, made with the lightest of touches, almost transparent -- to oceanic power. This counterpoint contained within her chosen forms gives her work a beauty that should last, with good reason, longer than nuclear shields, gas masks, and other fashions." --Stanley Moss
"Allison Funk's The Knot Garden is an extraordinary book. It deserves (and will soon find) readers as lucky as I have been to enjoy its luscious aches and perfect lovely sadnesses. Plainly, if she continues to write like this, to make the kind of leap this new book represents, Allison Funk will prove herself to be what some of us have figured her for already --a major American poet."
--Robert Wrigley

Genres: Poetry

100 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2002

Reviews

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

So many images held me...

Trained, wild, or translucent
Tallulah Falls
The Prodigal's Mother Speaks to God
Late Summer, Cicadas
Appearance at Dusk
On the Prairie

This is a lovely collection.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

I know of no more fierce immurement within words' uncanny power than Allison Funk's "Florescence," from The Knot Garden (the book's title is itself a troping of this power), a poem that begins in noticing the difference in the same-sounding "fluorescence": the former, the act, state or period of blooming, the latter the light emitted of a flower, a light by which much else might be observed. In third person, the narrator tells the story of a man who when his child by a second wife is born calls the first wife (who left him) upon quitting the delivery room, an extraordinary trope for the sort of opacity Funk sees in the relation of the two floral attributes. That this argument by resemblance becomes more detailed, specific in the narrator's representation of the first wife's own two births, without ever copping to being herself that wife, enacts something uncanny in language imaginatively holding together these seemingly inured perspectives, representational responsibilities: "Rushing from the delivery room | to the nearest phone, the first call he makes | he makes to her: | It's a boy.| And for the oddest moment it is theirs, | for what's imprinted within are the births | of his other children. . . ," fact of which seems, from the narrator's point of view, to go unobserved by the husband. At another level, however, the poem makes it clear that he calls the first wife out of the same love through which his opacity has been observed. This poem is of Keatsian candor and grace, it's one of the sanest, most beautiful poems I know. Perhaps others will find poems elsewhere in the book of this power; others, for me, nearly match it. The inclusion of the sequence on Vanessa Bell (earlier published in a chapbook), and the sonnet crown slightly mar the effect of the whole, if I'm at all a fair judge, but overall the power here is every bit as available to the reader as in the earlier, Living at the Epicenter.