Double Going: Poems

Richard Foerster's Double Going draws consoling connections between experience and the imagination, literature, myth. Contemplating a petit mal seizure, Foerster's speaker says, ""This is how, perhaps,/ we first came to know/ the gods: tiny ailment,// a sudden advent of dread."" In assessing photographs of the poet's boxer father, cigarette addiction, a waltz and everyday objects like pocket watches and swings, Foerster (Trillium) isolates each worldly thing or phenomenon in a precise, shimmering space unsullied by interference from forces beyond his own focus. ( Jan. 15)