Pursuit: Poems

Erica Funkhouser’s fourth book is full of animal and human pursuits: a leaf-cutting bee careens from branch to branch, looking for the right place to nest; a frustrated farmer stalks her garden’s invisible predator; a young woman insists on walking the length of a canyon whose river terrifies her; a dying man tries to avoid death long enough to die gracefully. Whether driven by elemental need or sublime desire, the inhabitants of these poems are actively engaged in seeking of every kind—physical, intellectual, and spiritual. Their very effort animates them.
Pursuit is also devoted to the details of living—what we build, how we eat, our solitary and communal habits, our obsessions, how we amuse ourselves, how we find and endure love, how we survive. As Rosanna Warren wrote of the poems in Funkhouser’s previous collection, “They have the feel of experience rescued from the conventional by a great steadiness of regard.”