Earthly

Funkhouser's fifth effort comes as an unexpected, and an unusually subtle, delight: at a time when most poets flaunt their strongest emotions, their strangest language, or their command of forms, Funkhouser instead shares the virtues of talented essayists (John McPhee, for example), recording and remembering the people and things she discovers in the outside world. The short poems at the front of her book take in topics as various as the history of New York's Frick Collection of Art, the origin of granite (""liquid magma and the original ice""), and the seasonal details of life on a farm. The sonnets with which she concludes depict Cezanne's preferred shades of blue, the death of a favorite horse, and the author's teen years, when ""We read John Donne while smoking Panama Red."" The most memorable parts, though, come in the middle of the volume: there Funkhouser (The Actual World) gives a whole sequence to the American apple, from the journeys of Johnny Appleseed (who ""donated fruit and sapling,"" to wagon-train pioneers, ""the thought of a draft of his own cider/ in five years enlivening the driver"") to the varietals of her own Massachusetts and the soil of her seaside town, ""on the edge of this abrupt continent of mud."" Despite a deft pair of pantouns and the rhyme in her sonnets, Funkhouser may not stand out as a virtuouso of form, nor do her poems try to do so. Instead, she asks-and deserves (more so than before)-attention as a poet of observation, one who looks steadily, patiently, and respectfully at the things, both built and natural, of this world.