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Blessing the Bones into Light (Coteau $9.95)
You know the Interior.
Miles of clearcut, miles of trees, bales of hay in fields, cows in the distance. Little towns with a strip-mall, a rec centre, and pickup trucks everywhere. "Grad '99" spray-painted on the cinder block of the high school. All the men wear baseball caps, and the women curl. If there are any poets at all, they are tough and swaggering; they ride language like a snowmobile. Nobody is expected to write a love poem to soap:
You who smell of
satsumas unpeeling,
gardenias foaming at
the petals,
water lilies washing
themselves in a bath of
their own perfume.
The Interior does not produce a poet who reflects on Bach's unaccompanied cello suites or captures the exact point of balance in adolescence with the word almost.
He is fifteen and spends late evenings
in the barn on the telephone telling a girl
almost everything.
But Carla Funk is such a poet. She grew up in the quintessential small town of Vanderhoof at the geographical centre of British Columbia. Vanderhoof, as you might imagine, is an agricultural and logging town of conservative values and plenty of pickup trucks. It also has a substantial Mennonite community, in which Carla was raised.
It is tempting to say that Blessing offers a breadth of subject matter and imagery, a clarity of vision and a subtlety of sensibility, that belies Funk's origins and are extraordinary for someone 25 years old. Her first book, Blessing the Bones into Light (Coteau $9.95) rings with both a deep seriousness and an expansive lightheartedness.
But poetry is neither determined by place, nor free of it. Funk's first immersion in language was in the Bible, the sound of it read aloud throughout her childhood. She has been influenced by the terror of Revelations, the imaginative landscapes of the Book of Job-and it was an initiation into the power of language that has led her to map the terrain of the soul and also to transform it.
"I longed for something beyond the ordinary, beyond Vanderhoof, beyond the happy, everyday childhood I had,"; she says. "There's something about boundaries that I wanted to go beyond.";
Blessed with encouragement in high-school, she recalls one creative writing graduate had covered the walls of her classroom with poetry. "I can still remember reading a line on the far, left wall - it was by e.e. cummings. 'no one not even the rain has such small hands'. I fell in love with that line, with words, with the writing on the wall.";
At the University of Victoria, Patrick Lane wrote in the margin of her first workshop poem, "Why Law? Why not poetry instead?"; A voice from the burning bush to an ear already attuned. Funk's work first appeared in a Harbour anthology of new Canadian writers, Breathing Fire, edited by Patrick Lane and Lorna Crozier; it now appears courtesy of Coteau's Open-eye Poetry Series.
The copper throat and long swallow of evening
washes in you a wide room of light
the outlines of night birds
a slope of sky bending into earth
Blessing the Bones into Light not only illuminates Funk's potential; it points to the potential of scattered communities and our disparate lives scattered among the clearcuts. It opens up, in Funk's own words, "the space of the page as a clean landscape where we can draw our own borders."; 1-55050-156-9
[George Sipos / BCBW 2000]
Miles of clearcut, miles of trees, bales of hay in fields, cows in the distance. Little towns with a strip-mall, a rec centre, and pickup trucks everywhere. "Grad '99" spray-painted on the cinder block of the high school. All the men wear baseball caps, and the women curl. If there are any poets at all, they are tough and swaggering; they ride language like a snowmobile. Nobody is expected to write a love poem to soap:
You who smell of
satsumas unpeeling,
gardenias foaming at
the petals,
water lilies washing
themselves in a bath of
their own perfume.
The Interior does not produce a poet who reflects on Bach's unaccompanied cello suites or captures the exact point of balance in adolescence with the word almost.
He is fifteen and spends late evenings
in the barn on the telephone telling a girl
almost everything.
But Carla Funk is such a poet. She grew up in the quintessential small town of Vanderhoof at the geographical centre of British Columbia. Vanderhoof, as you might imagine, is an agricultural and logging town of conservative values and plenty of pickup trucks. It also has a substantial Mennonite community, in which Carla was raised.
It is tempting to say that Blessing offers a breadth of subject matter and imagery, a clarity of vision and a subtlety of sensibility, that belies Funk's origins and are extraordinary for someone 25 years old. Her first book, Blessing the Bones into Light (Coteau $9.95) rings with both a deep seriousness and an expansive lightheartedness.
But poetry is neither determined by place, nor free of it. Funk's first immersion in language was in the Bible, the sound of it read aloud throughout her childhood. She has been influenced by the terror of Revelations, the imaginative landscapes of the Book of Job-and it was an initiation into the power of language that has led her to map the terrain of the soul and also to transform it.
"I longed for something beyond the ordinary, beyond Vanderhoof, beyond the happy, everyday childhood I had,"; she says. "There's something about boundaries that I wanted to go beyond.";
Blessed with encouragement in high-school, she recalls one creative writing graduate had covered the walls of her classroom with poetry. "I can still remember reading a line on the far, left wall - it was by e.e. cummings. 'no one not even the rain has such small hands'. I fell in love with that line, with words, with the writing on the wall.";
At the University of Victoria, Patrick Lane wrote in the margin of her first workshop poem, "Why Law? Why not poetry instead?"; A voice from the burning bush to an ear already attuned. Funk's work first appeared in a Harbour anthology of new Canadian writers, Breathing Fire, edited by Patrick Lane and Lorna Crozier; it now appears courtesy of Coteau's Open-eye Poetry Series.
The copper throat and long swallow of evening
washes in you a wide room of light
the outlines of night birds
a slope of sky bending into earth
Blessing the Bones into Light not only illuminates Funk's potential; it points to the potential of scattered communities and our disparate lives scattered among the clearcuts. It opens up, in Funk's own words, "the space of the page as a clean landscape where we can draw our own borders."; 1-55050-156-9
[George Sipos / BCBW 2000]
Submitted on July 10, 2003 in By David.
