Foustian: Two Chapbooks by Rebecca Foust

Dark Card
Rebecca Foust
Texas Review Press
2007 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize

Mom's Canoe
Rebecca Foust
Texas Review Press
Winner, Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize 2008

Reviewed by Laurie Rosenblatt

It’s fun to look at more than one chapbook by the same poet. Mom’s Canoe is the second chapbook I’ve read by Rebecca Foust and I’m happy to say it fulfills the promise that only flickered in Dark Card.

Dark Card, has as its focus a child’s autism. The issues compel empathy and respect. Unfortunately moments of clarity lie buried in lots of other stuff.  And though there is the occasional moving,  satisfying final snap— “…you remember to set your/ alarm. Charge your phone/ in case your friends call./ Your friends. Your friends call”—overall, the language doesn’t pop and the texture is largely confined to predictable line breaks or breaks that don’t seem to serve the poem’s meaning.  Some readers might view the flat tone of these poems as mirroring the subject matter if it were not accompanied by a lack of sharply focused image and telling detail. As readers we end up watching when we’d like to be thrown-in.

In Mom’s Canoe, Foust drills down into the specifics. These poems sift memory for the particular items that will serve the larger issues afoot in each poem. The collection hangs together and paints a vivid picture in controlled and taut lines. 

“Fossil Record,” takes technical language and makes it sing as Foust defines and observes: Brachiopod, Trilobite,/ Ammonite, Crinoid stem,/ fern in stone with spores/each bract; snakeskin/tree bark, imprint wing/pressed and fanned; one/metatarsal wears a ring. The poem winds this long view of time into issues of personal identity, contingency, and the threatened loss of loved ones. Foust does it in twenty-nine short lines.

Other poems are less lyrical and more narrative for instance, “Things Burn Down:”           

            ...What Dad loved was bells
            and sirens, to watch things burn down.  Damask

            is not what would bring my folks back. I'd guess
            garage sales, four-alarm fire bells, red squalls
            of new babies, Maybe a Bratwurst and beer

           served on an unfolded Altoona Mirror. Not damask,
           not fingerbowls for Christ's sake. If you don't
           get it by now, don't ask.

This poem, like others in the chapbook, stitches a family history out of things that trigger memory. Here, the recurrence of damask unmasks the ambivalence the next generation feels confronting the lower social (socio-economic) status of their parents and grandparents. Damask becomes an evolving image encompassing shame and prickly pride, “you won’t have to ask/how Gramma knew linen—soiled, in the wash/she took in each week, or why she had to sell/baked goods in the street off “white trash damask,”//yesterday’s newspaper…”

Questions for the “you” pepper “Things Burn Down.”  By asking “understand?,” “Do you understand that?” they weave the poem together toward the final, “If you don’t get by now, don’t ask,”—a combative immediacy. What at first seems to be a regional phrase, a tic, a placeholder for thought is finally revealed as a stiff-necked challenge to those who would assume and judge.

Near the end of the book, “Perennial,” takes a direct look at the implacable disinterest with which nature confronts the loves and happenings that seem to us so important and compelling, the  narcissisms that pass for meaning in our little lives. The poem begins, “When you’ve gone, it won’t matter to the musk rose.” And goes on risking the occasional rhyming couplet yet managing to avoid the comic tone that generally dogs the hard and fast rhyme.  Introduced with a list of flowers in the garden, (“hyssop’s rising pale flower foam” etc.), we come upon:

            and none of it matters. Not how you loved it, not
            how you knelt in each dark December plot
            to part the rich plait, reached

            through the wither of winter to find something born
            of decay of all that was young once...

In the end, Dark Card may appeal to parents facing similar challenges caring for an autistic child. I can’t help feeling that Foust might write a compelling memoir from this material. On the other hand, Mom’s Canoe, is full of lovely lines in a natural voice. The interplay between lyric and narrative poems lends a pleasing variation to the chapbook. Enjoy it.