One of the most valuable gifts a poet can give us is to make large things small. Most of us look to great ideas, classic religious and literary texts, and heroic figures from history and art for meaning and guidance, but so often these things get lost in the clouds. Enter the poet, who can set up lyric shop inside the epic edifice and bring it down to human scale. This is certainly one gift that Allison Funk possesses in abundance. In the poems of hers thatImage has published, she has taken the story of the prodigal son and depictions of the Virgin Mary by Albrecht Dürer and inhabited them so deeply that they become freshly available to us. Whether she is imagining the prodigal’s story through the eyes of his mother or brother or seeing Dürer’s Virgin as a flesh-and-blood woman, Funk makes the opaque translucent. In “The Madonna with the Iris,” Mary sits in an enclosed garden with the infant Jesus. Conscious of the overwhelming burden of meaning that she holds in her arms, and dimly aware of her son’s future suffering (and her own), Mary looks through an arch in the garden wall, “through which, when she needs to, / She can find, unbroken, / The level line of the sea.” In Funk’s rendering, Mary’s need for a steadying, contemplative refuge becomes one with our own desire to survive daily stresses and strains. So the poet’s incarnational art makes the divine human, vulnerable, real.

Some of Funk’s work is featured in Image issue 48 and issue 74. Read a poem by Funk here.

Allison Funk has published three books of poems: The Knot Garden (Sheep Meadow Press, 2002); Living at the Epicenter (Northeastern University Press, 1995); and Forms of Conversion(Alice James Books, 1986). She has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and prizes from Poetry and the Poetry Society of America. Her work has been included in The Best American Poetry; The Paris Review; Poetry; Shenandoah; Image; and other journals and anthologies. She is a Professor of English at Southern Illlinois University Edwardsville, where she is also an editor of Sou’wester Magazine.

Current Projects
February 2007

“I have almost finished a new book of poems, The Tumbling Box. Included in it, among other poems, is a series of the Virgin Mary and child in enclosed gardens, inspired by artist Albrecht Dürer. Two poems from this series appeared in a recent issue of Image (#48). Along with my work on my fourth book, I am translating contemporary poetry written in Catalan. The Spring 2006 issue of Sou’wester Magazine, which I co-edit, features the poetry of 11 Catalan writers, seven of whom I translated with the assistance of Nela Bureu, a professor at the University of Lleida in Spain. Sou’wester is a national literary journal published by Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where I teach in the Creative Writing Program.”