Erica Funkhouser's spirited fifth collection considers what it means to be earthly. She gives us a world in which granite foundation stones resemble "ceremonial animals, their throats unslit," and where the otherness of the real world collides with the reality of one's imagination. The central poem in the collection, "Pome," cuts into the mythos of Johnny Appleseed, the biology of apple farming, and the poet's own lavishly rendered memories of growing up on a farm. The final section of the book consists of a group of sonnets written as an homage to the Holy Sonnets of John Donne — witty, graceful poems that limn the coming into consciousness of a young poet. A departure from both Funkhouser's previous historical narratives and her compressed lyrics, the wide and sweeping poems in Earthly are sure to deliver this poet her greatest recognition yet.

"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." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Erica Funkhouser is the author of three previous books of poems and the recipient of three awards from the Poetry Society of America. She currently teaches poetry workshops at MIT.