by Richard Foerster
BOA Editions 2006
Reviewed by Julia Istomina
Effectual Strangeness
Books written in the aftermath of personal suffering or the death of a loved one sometimes leave an antipathic reader, who is not close to the “victim,” drained due to the often predictable literary interpretations of the stages of the author’s mourning.
This given, I anticipated much from Richard Foerster’s ambitious title. I wasn’t too surprised, then, at the swings in emotion through the three invariably unbalanced sections of Foerster’s dirge—or at the fifth-to-final poem “Smoke Tree,” which culminates with “I was no longer sad.” Furthermore, Foerster’s puzzling formal tone and diction makes the book a demanding read—though reflections and refractions of light and landscape save the movement here, revealing perplexing, sensational, and even addicting one-liners.
At first I expected a framework of Greek myth and an invocation of muse—I received the latter in the opening poem, as the narrator surveys his empathies and concludes with an italicized, “There is no death in this world / of beauty. No life you cannot pluck / back out of thinnest air.” But Foerster is not giving away the ending: continuing through the book I found less of a soliloquy on death and more play with language and the everyday instances of being human.
Foerster is brilliant at coming up with unexpected words that stifle any presuppositions. For example, in “The Convergence,” we have “but look, that shoal of menhaden / the striped bass slices through.” So unforeseen is the conjoining of “shoal” with “menhaden” that at once I begin to understand Foerster’s poetry in terms of color, of light and dark. And in the title poem, we get:
Even her jeweler’s terms
To describe shifting auroral
Patterns seemed neon buzz
Meant more to dazzle unlikely
Prospects than define
Infinite illusory depths:
Fan harlequins, peacock
Tails, chaff and straw,
A mackerel sky roiling
With rarest sunset reds –
“much like Napoleon’s gift
To Josephine, The Burning
Of Troy.”
In his subsequent notes, Foerster comments that Napoleon’s gift was promptly lost by Josephine, making this momentous gift as fleeting as the deathly “burning such as his, / I once laid waste / a citadel, spent all I had.”
Although there is exquisite word and line formation, Foerster largely abstains from experimentation with form. The only two poems that diverge are “Tithonus” and “Smoke,” where colons jarringly separate (or sew together) disparate components that mostly leave off verbs, thereby favoring image over action. This technique allows Foerster some strangeness, and where there is only the space of a few words he creates an effectual, paradoxical image. However, he undermines the careful segregation of parts by beginning “Tithonus” with “Sarcophagus of morning” and ending with “sarcophagus of mourning.” Pun oh so intended, received, and denied.
Foerster—at his most engaging during dissections of his floundering (or absent) faith—puts his own depth behind “the color of things.” Unlike many other writers, he resists using religion as a crutch for personal philosophizing, but invokes first feeling and sensory perception, then content. This results in works that are often anti-pastoral, in that truth is unveiled where romanticism once hid it, and the author is very much sitting beneath the litmus tree, shooting the shit among “the pungent slop of pigs.”
My biggest criticism of The Burning of Troy is the unevenness of subject and tone. Sometimes we get the straight and narrow, as in “Among the Daughters of Lycomedes.” Then there’s the Gothic evocation of Dickinson in the tight and narrow, yet dark-edged, “Samsara.” The book deals overtly with death and with the shadow of a deadening belief system. Consequently, it deals in the self as purveyor of sanctified experience. The most successful poem is “Spoons,” with its nothing-missing yet sparse imagery, and a language that exploits suffocation. Through its devices it causes a sort of choking in the reader:
In the momentary convex
Gleam of one stainless
Steel spoon held hot
From washing, the stippled damp
Wiped all at once clear
With a cloth, just as the hand
Begins to ease down toward the tray,How grief can shimmer up
Through such idle motion-
How the weight of a left arm
Draped over another, as a finger
Seeks to feather a nipple
Into flame, can seem six-
Feet’s worth of dirt atopA ravaged cage, while lungs
Struggle beneath to find enough
Breath to say No, I can’t
Breathe like this – then as quick
All slips into place, rattling
An instant before that silence
After the drawer’s slid shut.
All of which is enough to make me cry uncle. The jutting end-stops and convolution of images denied, the pacing that seems irregular but is truly mastered in its effect, this is the Foerster I admire. In accordance with the “high-art” formalities of Foerster’s tone and diction, The Burning of Troy works for the reader if the reader is willing to work for it.
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