Double Going
By Richard Foerster, FCO '71
95 pages. Rochester, N.Y.: BOA Editions, Ltd., 2002.
$12.95

On the cover of Double Going, Richard Foerster's fourth collection of poetry, is a painting by DeLoss McGraw titled "The Crying Man Comforted by Himself at Ten Years of Age." It's an appropriate image.

Shot through with a similar sense of consolation and double consciousness, the finely wrought poems in this powerful volume bear the weight of memories and losses, of childhood confusions and adult longings, and often bring an understanding that is neither facile nor sentimental.

"At some point you begin to wonder where / things lost in childhood have gone, // how they become the dark matter / inexplicably accounting for more // than the shimmering weight of galaxies".

So begins "The Lost," setting the tone for the three-part journey of personal discovery and healing that shapes Foerster's book. In the first section, "Velocities of the Lost," the poem "Hymn" provides a clue to the methods of the poet, who glimpses a "holy stasis" while standing in a field during an autumnal equinox, but is suddenly brought back to the difficult task at hand: "sifting the stuttered chaff / of loss and love and longing".

Foerster contemplates the chaff of childhood and the "dark matter" of life with compassion and an abiding knowledge that, if we are to fully understand ourselves -- our longings for love and our hopes for grace -- we must carefully consider all that is left behind. The "double going" of the title, then, refers particularly (though not exclusively) to the loss of childhood and the death of the poet's father.

The middle section of the book, "The Knot," focuses on the ambivalence -- the love and resentment, admiration and anger -- Foerster's speaker feels toward his father. These contradictory feelings are exposed and explored in a series of searching poems about cigarettes and alcohol, fishing, a photograph of the poet's father as a young boxer, and ordinary objects like a hand-whittled whistle and a toolbox. Rummaging through the contents of his father's old toolbox, "these totems / of your craft," the poet tries "to sift the shrapnel of your love / for one uncrimped helix, / just one uncrippled shaft / I can turn or hammer home."

In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke advises the young poet of the title, "Everything you can think of as you face your childhood, is good. Everything that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is right." Foerster -- whose ability to describe quotidian things (a pocketwatch, a swing, an old mirror) with clarity and insight has been compared with Rilke's -- clearly absorbed the German poet's counsel. The "double" of the title also implies the kind of intensification of consciousness that Rilke describes: the poet and the reader are made "more" through Double Going -- more conscious of themselves, more aware of impermanence and regeneration.

Not simply focused on the "things lost in childhood" and the "shrapnel" of a deceased father's love, Foerster perceives the seemingly limitless possibilities of life, and of language. A hard-earned grace is perhaps achieved in "Retrievals," the last section of the book. In "Garden Spider," the poet marvels at a spider spinning its web, "the perfect fretwork / to grace a backyard garden." But come the morning the poet finds that the spider has "consumed / each filament" to respin the web somewhere else. Faced with "empty space," the poet wonders if he should admire "the way / the very fabric of a world / can be chewed up for weaving again".

Foerster has received numerous honors for his work, including the "Discover"/The Nation Award, Poetry magazine's Bess Hokin Prize and the 2000-2001 Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship. In Double Going, he comes across as a precise poet of loss and renewal, a visionary who -- in the words of the French poet Apollinaire that serve as epigraph to the book's last section -- is able "To see clearly at a distance / To see everything / Near at hand".

--Ryan Stellabotte