Mastering the Craft

A review of Rebecca Foust’s Dark Card and Mom’s Canoe

(Texas Review Press, 2008 &2009)

by Rich Logsdon, Senior Editor, Red Rock Review and published in RRR in 2009.

Author of two recently published chapbooks, Rebecca Foust is a poet who richly deserves our attention. The poems of the first, Dark Card, are disturbing and honest, their language riveting the reader’s mind and imagination with lines that express the poet’s outrage over others’ treatment of her son, their arrangement tracing the poet’s attempts to come to grips with a world in which the beautiful and innocent can be born with life-devastating afflictions. The second collection, Mom’s Canoe, verges at times on brilliance: the language, the use of subtle rhyme, the meter, and the formal structures of many of the pieces are the products of one who has begun to master the difficult craft of poetry.

Held together by a voice that moves from angry desperation to hopeful empathy, Dark Card contains poems that are occasionally dark, always brutally honest, and very moving. All have something to do with a son whose disability at once sets him apart from others, makes him a scapegoat for the mean-spirited packs of school yard bullies, and bestows upon him (as a blessing) an awareness of a world that the poet can recognize and articulate only as she comes to commiserate with her son. Accordingly, some of the early poems may startle us with lines that reveal the poet’s anger over her son’s condition and others’ responses to it: “Don’t say you were trying to be kind,/ you ball-less prick soft dick eunuch,” Foust writes in “Eunuch.” The rage, however, is only the starting point for a poet who moves beyond her anger to articulate her longing to become part of the child’s world from which she feels isolated—and thereby to protect him:

Dream-blind eyes, what dumb-bully night-terror

Yanks you awake, sweats you

And chatters your teeth: What demon grins

And writhes shut every grammar school door…. (from “Unreachable Child”)

The poems of longing give way to poems of compassion born of the artist’s ability to empathize not only with her son but with others who are afflicted by crippling disabilities and to a hopefulness that comes from her ability to envision a world in which the cruelty shown her son is more than balanced by a hope that arises from seemingly insignificant sources. The poem that comes to mind is titled “Empathy,” a marvelous piece about a veterinarian whose autism has allowed her, since youth, to commiserate with cattle going to the slaughter:

She was thought to lack empathy

For sad events, her classmates’ tears,

But she noticed the other things

--rocks getting crushed, stars

That were dying. She hate how

Cattle herded for slaughter would mill

About moaning, stamping their hooves,

Would sometimes stampede

In eye-rolling panic….

Indeed, when all is said and done, Dark Card is about personal triumph. It is a collection that appeals, ultimately, to anyone who has suffered through and somehow risen above the occasional but unavoidable cruelty of others.

I found the second work Mom’s Canoe nothing short of remarkable, a complex vision that provides testimony to Foust’s own emotional and spiritual growth as well as to an aesthetic development born from her struggles with the aspects of the craft she seeks to master. It is a collection that demands that this poet be taken seriously. Thus, what we find in the poems of this wonderful collection is Fousts’ keen control of language and a corresponding selection and arrangement of images and sounds that give life, meaning, and shape to memories wed to a landscape torn by mining but rich in fossil records that speak of something, locked within the parameters of a natural world, that is permanent and enduring. In this collection, sense and emotion commingle to produce a richly textured collection that succeeds through brilliant imagery, the natural use of sound, and an understanding of poetic form that reveal Rebecca Foust’s mastery of her craft. Simply consider her the opening to her piece, “Allegheny Mountain Bowl”:

You can turn round and round and round

And always see mountains. Blue Knob,

Wopsononok, Brush, Davis, and Lock

Usurp the sky and conjure its seasons

--July’s heavy wet sails, stars slung low

Like lanterns, lily-thronged ditches down

In the cove….

The lines move by an easy natural rhythm (Whitman did say that our vernacular contains a rhythm of its own) enhanced by alliteration, subtle rhyme and a concluding image whose language render it visible and tangible.

Or consider the final lines of “The Bees Are Inside,” a poem that tells of her childhood friendship with one who had already been demonized by the community and so picks up on a theme that ran through her Dark Card:

I saw

A cursed angel or changeling

Flung headlong from God, and then from a tree

We’d climbed a thousand times. It took

A purposeful, soaring fall,

The town’s whisper-buzz whispering like it had

For years, we kids not meant to hear

The rest, all that was twisted

And broken. Eyes clear blue, hair like light,

He said it all through the night

That he died. The bees, he said,

the bees are inside. The bees are in my head.(from “The Bees Are Inside”).

The imagery, the subtle rhyming, the meter, the allusion to Milton’s Paradise Lost in this passage are representative of the marvelous poems contained in this collection.

For me, the most striking poem in this second collection may be “Raystown River Trout.” In this, Foust alludes to Elizabeth Bishop’s famous poem “The Fish,” which ends with a burst of mysticism affirming the immanence of Christ in the rainbow colors of the fish. There is no such burst of mysticism in “Raystown,” in which Foust tells of catching a fish:

…There was no rainbow,

rainbow, rainbow, no communion

with Christ’s flesh. Just this prism

flash gone gray and my wish

I’d never caught it; I wished I’d cut

the line before the glitter got away.

This powerful poem signals the poet’s possibly a rejection of the miraculous, possibly a turning away from a God Who has failed to cure the afflictions of the innocent, but most likely the conviction that destruction of the environment has stripped the fish of anything divine.

The poems contained in the collections Dark Card and Mom’s Canoe reveal a remarkably talented writer whose brutal honesty, ability to empathize, and mastery of the craft make her one poet worth watching. Rebecca Foust deserves the praise reserved for poets who have just broken the surface and for whom the sky is indeed the limit.