Reviewed by Barbara Crooker

 

Mom’s Canoe

Rebecca Foust

Texas Review Press, English Department, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX 77341, 2009, 31 pp., paper, $12.95

Winner of the 2008 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize

 

Rebecca Foust has had the amazing fortune to win the same national chapbook competition two years running. As her readers will see when they open this book and start reading, it is an honor that is well-deserved. Mom’s Canoe gathers poems about family and place, setting them in the Allegheny Mountains of western Pennsylvania, an area of farms and woodlands that was also a coal mining region in the last century. The decline of the mines and railroads left a path of environmental and economic destruction, which figures as a theme in this book, as does the natural beauty of the region, and the strength and endurance of the people who live there, some of whom are Foust’s relatives.

 

As evidenced in her previous collection, Dark Card, Foust’s strengths lie in her precise use of imagery and her use of language. This is a land where the coal’s mined out, “uncapped and seeping mercury,” (“Raystown River Trout”) and the railroad’s gone, leaving “engines rusted to tracks.” (“Allegheny Mountain Bowl”) Strip mines gouge the landscape, leaving “a terrible lunar beauty,” (“Strip Mine”) and “the old / Boyer Candy plant / has gone dark.” It’s a place where “everyone’s going / or gone,” (“Allegheny County Winter Day”) where people “fry up / scrapple for breakfast,” (“Books for the Blind”) and where domestic violence is just beneath the surface (“her arms bloom pansies, blue, purple / and brown.”)(“The Mountains Come Close When It Rains”)

 

Foust has grounded all of this with a deep sense of place. Her book is an “archeological record” (poem of the same title) of “each loved thing lost,” where the names of the mountains read like poetry: “Blue Knob, / Wopsononock, Brush, Davis, and Lock” and the air is “a thin gruel the men sip.” There’s “always the need to make rent,” and most cars have “a doe, meat roped to the hood.” (Allegheny Mountain Bowl”) Even some of the titles, like “Altoona to Anywhere,” give a sense of Rust Belt emptiness, where you “pick up Velveeta / instead of brie,” and if you don’t watch out, you’ll be back “where you started” “with the same back porch weeping, / the same husbands sleeping around, / addiction, cancer, babies born wrong; / the same siren nights . . ./ all that / gorgeous, pitiless song.” (“Altoona to Anywhere”)

 

Yet despite the bleakness of the landscape, there still is beauty: “ the trees wear fierce diadems after the ice storms.” (“Allegheny Mountain Bowl”) Here, the “willow / will continue to pour its yellow-green waterfall // next to forsythia, one half-tone better on the scale / of bright.”(“Perennial”) And even though “the whole falls apart,” “still the shards / glitter, brown diamonds on water.” (“The Mountains Come Closer When It Rains”)

 

Throughout the book, Foust distinguishes herself with an inventive use of language, as seen in the imagery already quoted, and by a musical ear. Take “Things Burn Down,” a transgressive villanelle (4 extra stanzas, and no final quatrain), where she mutes the B rhyme like this: shells/sell/trowel/drilled/papermill/fields/feed/bells/squalls, making lovely music that echoes long after you have turned the page.

 

And this music enters the landscape and turns it into a place where poetry happens. Listen to how she closes the book, taking something ordinary, and turning it to magic:                                               The traffic

                light is wanton,

                an exotic

                painted parrot

                or harlot—

               

                Emerald.

                Burnt gold.

                Then

                Throat-catching

                Scarlet.

                            (“November”)