From the Sketchbooks of Vanessa Bell

Parallel Press Chapbook Series

by Allison Funk

"…I, turning over the drawings/I've made through the years,/look into these mirrors/for some other shape the light might return to me…" As a painter may be endlessly fascinated with changing qualities of color, light and shape, so Allison Funk's poems propose varied perspectives on the "interlocking circles, intersecting lines" of family and world dramas that form the pattern of Vanessa Bell's life. Funk's phrases are distinctive verbal brush strokes, her clarity of language focusing the very light with which the artist is so occupied. Looking "beneath the touchable surface," she seeks to convey Bell's perceptions rather than her literal experiences. "I know the tissue-thin division," Bell explains. "[I know how] …you can leave the material world/for a vanishing point." Funk depicts Bell, sister of writer Virginia Woolf, reveling in what light reveals of "curves and hollows,/deep shadows and silver edges," even while the tragedies and betrayals of Bell's life as daughter/wife/sister/mother are darkly overwhelming, "...colour gone…/the lamps that one has navigated by/put out…" Yet the one constant, both for Bell and in Funk's work, is the reliability of internal, as well as external, light. While at times stark and cool, this light can also be restfully forgiving. "The light that dusts the surface,…/may be perfect,/though what it glazes is flawed. Love,/love seems lately/to abide in the light."

21 pages, Chapbook

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written in the aftermath of the poems from Living at the Epicenter, Funk's Vanessa Bell poem is a stylistic curio within Funk's work. Part literary gossip, part ekphrastic paraphrase, part late-second wave recuperative inquiry into Bell's reputation, part critical interpretation of the Bell-Virginia Woolf correspondence, From the Sketchbooks of Vanessa Bell seems finally an experiment in point of view and forensic research -- a project in search of an articulation of what it might be for. No doubt I'm a limited reader of it. In my humble, Vanessa Bell is too important a figure to be recuperated or spoken for; this poem can't avoid the imputation that Funk tries to do both. Certainly she had every right to use Bell as a way of exploring the achievement in power that had been Living at the Epicenter; but to bring in the gossip of Bell's relationship to her sister strikes me as a mistake.