The Tumbling Box

by Allison Funk

Allison Funk is the author of three previous collections of poetry, The Knot Garden, Living at the Epicenter, and Forms of Conversion. She has received the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize and awards from the Society of Midland Authors, the Poetry Society of America, Poetry, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

72 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Tumbling Box begins with an epigraph from Robert Duncan's "My Mother Would Be A Falconress," and its art, woven through like Bending the Bow's in two poetic sequences, is warranted in the Duncanian insistence that words are powers. "Behind the shadow a word is," as Funk puts it, "another awaits," and Funk is a master of letting a speaker's power in the poem come from her deep listening to words' "waiting," or solicitations of the more than human field. An ekphrastic sequence on Durer's Mother and Child typology, and a sequence on Houdini, allow her to meditate on these two differing but nonetheless filial magics -- visual representation and sleight of hand. The book is also as shrewd and un-defended an account of motherhood as I know: one feeling it's possible to get from the stories here, small narratives of tragedy and careful late-life stewardship, is that the mother in these poems sees her motherhood in a "false" light that keeps their speaker "true." The enormity of faith here in the myth of poetry is rare; in poetry as a myth of true speech, or utterance that can tell it (the "threads" of Penelope's warp and woof) true.