On Julie Funderburk

Fresh from the undergraduate program at Chapel Hill, Julie Funderburk was in my first class of M.F.A. poetry students in the fall of 1992. Since then we have been colleagues and fellow poets, and I have been witness to more than ten years of development in her poetry and poetics. Essentially Julie is a lyric poet whose work compresses narrative elements—and she is a narrative poet whose words are alive with the strum of the lyre. There is a supreme tension in her work between the assuring surface of craft and the wilder waves of impulse. Many of her poems including the ones herein seek to retrieve an instance in time by seizing, illuminating, and ultimately transforming it. Like Robert Penn Warren, she is a poet whose major subject is time and how events and people endure through the various lenses of separation and distortion. In an age in which vagueness, fakery, and linguistic contortions pose as intelligence and music, Julie Funderburk's poems are extremely valuable because they are beautiful, resonant, and complicated in their understanding of the human heart.

I love the wonder, wisdom, and sanity of these poems. I have no doubt Julie Funderburk's work will find a wide audience and book publication.

—Stuart Dischell, author of three collections of poetry: Good Hope Road, Evenings & Avenues, and Dig Safe. He is an associate professor in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at U.N.C. Greensboro.