Living at the Epicenter

by Allison Funk, Sonia Sanchez (Contributor)

Includes such pieces as "Insomnia," "Backstroke," "Turning forty," " After dark," and "Faultline"

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published November 2, 1995

Reviews

[Douglas · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite poetry book of all time. 'Nuff said.

[mwpm · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took to fire like a lover.
A careless match, a windblown ember

dropped onto the drained swampland
dark with carbon,

and the muck married the fire.
Cursed with perfect memory

a mint field in northern Indiana
could burn for years.

People joked that anything could provoke it:
lightning miles away, a word, wanton or ill chosen,

a man and a woman in the loam.
But with a black disposition

and a temper that flared
behind the plow, my great-grandfather

could find no humor in this,
much less in his name, German for spark.

Tonight what's still burning
filters up through the porous layers,

surfacing as a telltale haze,
and I cannot sleep for knowing

all the green mint in the world
cannot conceal it.

We begin by accident
and smoulder as long as we last.

- Insomnia, pg. 6

* * *

At first it is colder than I think I can bear,
but I go down anyway, go under,
and begin to move as if borne through the first passage

in a pool that tastes faintly of salt,
wondering if it's true the self is no polestar,
that we reinvent ourselves

like the grass. My pain
could be that storm of mayflies
lifting off the river for a day,

ephemera, they're named, ephemerella.
Even Polaris is not fixed. Years after us,
north will be marked by another star.

The water, when rent, mends itself -
this glitter, broken by thrashing swimmers,
repairs its silver net, forgets

faster than I who have chosen to swim on my back,
always looking at what I have left.
I count my laps, each invocation

and amen. My arms are like children:
how easily they tire, would sleep.
But I keep forcing them over my head,

insisting on an architecture
raised and ruined until, nearly naked,
I'm liquid in this crucible.

- Backstroke, pg. 14

* * *

Lovers, all the drifting continents, are on
in the imagined world, Pangaea.
There, the hip of Africa
beats against the coast of Brazil.
Birds rain over the shared plains
of Eurasia and North America.
Mother, father. How long ago it seems.
Two hundred million years at least
since I left that fertile valley.
And still, the sea floor is spreading,
setting my loved countries adrift.
Mapmaker, palm reader, I turn to you
and the ancients, who, seeing between
islands of stars, linked,
like silversmiths,
Andromeda, her Perseus.

- Turning Forty, pg. 30

* * *

What is heaven if not this?
The cicada in all its awkwardness,
still the shape of the coffin

it shed on a tree,
rising now
on the public threads of its wings.

Hear the escapees -
a sizzling in the limbs and the leaves,
like something's burning

in this summer's heat, erotic,
so unmelodic it hurts to listen.
This is not as I imagined

the born again.
Blunt face. Walleyed,
grotesque even,

as a gargoyle is human,
those the dark has made
find one another.

- Cicada, pg. 45

[Sbinc Burns · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent poet. Accessible and profound.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

The magic in this second volume of poems from Allison Funk is difficult to distinguish from the atavism of the author's discovery of the mid-western landscape in its primordial power. Her own family is from the region; however, Living at the Epicenter, taken quite strictly from the title poem, is Eliza Bryan's testimony, from 1811-1812, of the New Madrid Earthquake in Southeastern Missouri, not far and just across a tumultuous river from Edwardsville, where Funk settled in the late Eighties. In another sense, then, that epicenter is the author's own life, and the discovery of a subject matter beyond the coordinates of a self mediated by the conventions of confessional poetry, conventions which muddle many of the poems in Funk's first volume, Forms of Conversion (1986). Superb poem after superb poem mark Living at the Epicenter as the volume which seals a style -- indeed, the title is particularly apt, for while the poems in the book's first section demonstrate Funk consolidating the remarkable stylistic indifference and majesty of the first book's best poems (e.g., its title poem), these remain the poems of the thought which flies too far, for the enthusiastic "conversion" over into a mood of telling that can't finish itself; while in Living in the Epicenter's last section, in a poem like "After Dark," for example, many of the enthusiasms of the first set of conversions are more or less repudiated in favor of their pastoral abridgments. "Imagination," Funk tells us in the first poem, "Stalactites," written in response to the Ozark cave system, "can only take us so far," and this line seems to be a judgment on her first book's tendency to eroticize the far flung thought in its representation of marriage and motherhood. Many of the book's poems are set on the Mississippi, under the mountain ranges on the Missouri and Kentucky sides of the river, and in the imagination of the river's historical and ancestral past -- the presence, again, of an atavism. "Stalactites," remarkably, figures this atavism in imagining those survivors of past midwestern earthquakes who took refuge in the Ozark cave system, "drifted on, || as if blessed, beyond harm | between the glittering walls | lit by their candles." Here, pace Plato, the author suggests her solidarity with the irreligious who have decided a form "can only take us so far," since it will always be subject to narrational intrusion: "But I know the rest of the way: | how at first, the pilgrims surfacing || near where the underground river | spills forth as a spring | were almost blinded by a light || as wondrous as what they'd seen within. | Then, slowly, as their eyes adjusted, | through the deciduous green || they saw it all, all the damage done, | as if dreaming again." The atavism, then, is right in the present with the speaker, the story's power in no way lessened as a result.

[Madeline · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think there's a thematic unity to these poems, in as much as they are all interested in the difficulty of establish (creating) permanence in a temporal world - of creating or extracting order/knowledge of out chaos. That's kind of a heavy theme, and it could be dull, leaden, or didactic (just the beginning of all the awful things it could be!) in the wrong hands, but Funk doesn't slip - there's actually a poem about a tightrope walker in here, so I'll let you draw the necessary comparisons there.

Funk also uses some unexpected motifs: earthquakes, space. More expected are things like water (though she uses it very well) and birds and plant life (the poem "Redbuds" reminded me of "Meditation at Lagunitas"). I liked this collection, though it's slim even by the standards of poetry collections. I hope I'll find more of her work.

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love the artful organization of the poems in this book. I love the poems representations and how they are presented to the reader. This is a very creative piece.