From the Sketchbooks of Vanessa Bell

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.”

Allison Funk has published two books of poems, Living at the Epicenter, which won the Samuel French Morse Prize (Northeastern University Press, 1995) and Forms of Conversion (Alice James Books, 1986). Her third full-length book will be published by The Sheep Meadow Press in 2002. She has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the George Kent Prize from Poetry magazine, the Celia B. Wagner Prize from the Poetry Society of America, and the 1995 Award for Poetry from the Society of Midland Authors. Her work was included in The Best American Poetry, 1994. Individual poems have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Shenandoah, and other journals. Educated at Columbia University, she is Professor of English at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville.

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Excerpt

Landscape, Virginia’s House

Today the light is irresolute,
pastel rising over the hills,
levitating in the mist,

then settling down over the tomatoes
and onions, the kitchen garden.
I follow it across the yard

as it skims the water lilies
in the pond, the columbine,
to the great elm

where Virginia’s ashes lie.
I am less interested these days
in how we fell away from each other.

The light that dusts the surface,
sticks and the grey-blue stones water burnishes,
flowing over everything, may be perfect,

though what it glazes is flawed. Love,
love seems lately
to abide in the light.