POETRY

SURE SHOT by Erica Funkhouser (Houghton Mifflin: $18.95; 110 pp.) . Erica Funkhouser, on the other hand, talks a lot. Her poems tell various stories about people she knows and things she’s seen. They ramble, they end suddenly, the pronoun you is used a little clumsily now and then to draw the reader into the poem. The poems written in the first person, like “Valentine,” are less acrobatic; there’s less distance between, in Funkhouser’s own words, “detail and longing.” In fact, this slavery to detail is mentioned several times throughout the collection: “It would almost be better to be young again,/ the multiple longings / obscuring any need for detail. . . . “ and in “Sure Shot,” Funkhouser admires the protagonist, Annie Oakley: “The only way to tell this life,” Oakley says, “is to squint away the details.” But these are not two poles in a seamless universe, and in several places, as in the poem “Cryogenics,” Funkhouser’s details are brimming with longing. This is the deftly told memory of a little boy named Franky in the hospital bed next to Funkhouser’s. She is 8 years old in the poem, and she tries, through a resplendent smorgasbord of details, to cheer Franky, who has been hit by a school bus. The second half of the book consists of three poetic portraits of 19th-Century women, which are smooth and compelling, but ever so slightly forced. This is the way a 20th-Century woman wants us to understand the rock and the hard place of these women’s lives, as if we could find some solace in their small rebellions.

Grief, by Erica Funkhouser

I try to impose the static beauty of what remains, like the one utensil in an auctioned drawer, upon the cluttered truth of what is gone, not even gone, but going. I try to keep my mind at noon at least as long as noon lasts, the length of the firehouse whistle, the full reverberation from the forest, the final couplet spoken by the flicker hammering for grubs in fallen hemlock.