Description: "The reader experiences von Funcke's political engagement, her vibrant empathy for the suffering of others, and her search for motives driving the actions of human beings. One feels an ardent desire for openness in encountering others, emanating from an insatiable hope for change and an end to degrading, inhumane conditions everywhere."-C Wyrwa
Brief description: Born in Munich, Ute von Funcke still lives there. She taught languages, ethics, and acting at secondary schools. She trained adults in theater, body work, Qigong, and expressive dance. She has written plays for children, and in 2004, as her interweaving arts of communication continued to evolve, she began writing poetry.
Review Quotes:
"The title of Ute von Funcke's selected poems is Between Question & Answer, but these poems equally suspend between grand purpose and minute observation, a desire to confront head-on our sustained, collective human failings and a longing to lift into view moments of small, profound intimacy. Von Funcke's striking images ('I love the early morning / when the day's not yet landed in the ashtray / a twisted butt') and stark colors ('the yellow horse of daybreak, ' 'the doctor's mask / turns black') seem, in the best sense, to channel Trakl; yet, her poems, in their range and ambition, are strikingly original--not to mention deeply moving."--Wayne Miller, author of Post- and The City, Our City
"Ute von Funcke is a seeress--one who looks more closely and intensively than others. Hence her 'blinks of eye' turn into something special: a window into the deeper structures of our world."--Michael Krüger, President of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts; poet, author, and former publisher of Hanser Press, Munich
"These are essential poems--crucial to the human enterprise with our penchant for violence, our fathomless suffering, and also our compassion and our hope. They traffic in essences--compact image-theaters, imprints of sight, judicious voicings, pronounced blank space. The act of writing is visceral--'My green pen tumbling / between fur and black claws'--as elemental power breaks through the backdrop of silence with a comment, a startling metaphor, a primal tableau. In a 'Postwar Fragment, ' as in the many moving poems about violence in the collection, von Funcke's radical empathy conveys how memory and imagination are still under siege in the old bombsite as 'stillness / gorges on the gray time / till it bursts.'
"Through myth, war, nature, relationship, striking renderings of the drama of the act of writing, these poems tell us what we've done and what we could do. Like Wislawa Szymborska, von Funcke's poems are sly, memorable, unexplainable yet utterly understandable; they take a planet-eye view that sees us all at once. Stuart Friebert's perfect-pitch translations bring these poems over into American English just in time. What a profound gift of 'nothing but the essential mystery.'"--Robin Behn, author of Quarry Cross, The Yellow House, and Horizon Note