In Grief, Beauty

Shivani continuedfrom previous page epiphany is immaculately set up. The panoramic sweep never spills beyond the grasp of the containing metaphor, the tight conceit. Robert Liddell's "Whatever Happened to Sébastien Grosjean?" is in the same mode, as the setting of a tennis match between overdog Roger Fédérer and underdog Grosjean at Houston's elite River Oaks tournament, watched by the corporate-trader point-of-view character and his upper-class friend Win (whose father, boxholder at the club, is dying of cancer), says nothing about class difference, has no point except to suggest that die upper classes might have a difficult time grieving. Grosjean can't make a comeback; it is inevitable. Can elegance and panache beat back death? That's not even the symbolic territory this exploitative story breaches. There isn't in these workshop productions a single searing note of anger at the world's poverty and injustice, the vast bridge between classes and nations's degree ofaffluence; American consumerism owns the world, and the narrative strategies of these authors smoothly reinforce this unalterable given. Anis Shivani, one ofthe last refugeesfrom the workshop system, labors Trollope-like in a Houston slum, composingfiction that belongs more to the nineteenth than the twenty-first century. His novel-in-progress, Intrusion, is about an American anthropologist researching a squatter settlement in contemporary Pakistan. In Grief, Beauty Kevin Prüfer The Burning of Troy Richard Foerster BOA Editions http://www.boaeditions.org 96 pages; paper, $15.50 In the first few pages of Richard Foerster's arresting The Burning ofTroy, the poet's long-time partner dies. His ghost, however, haunts the rest of the book, even as Foerster's subjects evolve and change, even as they distance themselves from the actual circumstances of the death, the poet's gaze circling away from the hospital bed and the empty house to the seashore, to the poet's own boyhood, then overseas to Bohemia, France and, finally, Australia. It's probably unfashionable to say it in this age of poetic circuitousness and ironic distance, but Richard Foerster is at his very best when he approaches his grief directly and speaks of it succinctly , when he finds in the natural world around him objects that serve, metaphorically, to suggest the complexities of his loss. In "Artichoke," a lovely poem composed almost completely of one daedal sentence, the poet finds the nuances ofenduring love in various qualities of the artichoke: For all the bother, it's the peeling away we savored, the slow striptease toward a tender heart— how each petal dipped in the buttery sauce was raked across our lower teeth, its residue less redolent of desire than sweet restraint, a mere foretaste of passion, but the scaly plates piled up like potsherds in a kitchen midden, a history in what's now useless, discarded— One finds Foerster similarly engaged with the natural world as a way to articulate grief in most of the opening poems in the book. A carrier pigeon, for instance, lands in the garden the day he learns of his lover's disease, resting among the flowers as he awaits a more definite prognosis, the world of the garden reflecting his own uncertainties and hopes. Elsewhere, as the lover dies, the poet discovers a bat "crumpled / like a chamois, soiled and stiff / on the dew-wet lawn...." There is nothing programmatic about Foerster's Detailfrom cover transformation of the nature around him into ready metaphor for his own griefand loss. Nor do his elegiac poems seem especially confessional or, worse, merely personal. Rather, one senses in them an active, living mind struggling to understand a loss and oblivion that is, by its very nature , impossible to understand. For Foerster, these flowers and birds, skies and oceans are the most direct way he has at hand to express what is, finally, unexpressable, his metaphors working always in the service of complexity and nuance. Foerster has written a brilliant, emotionally complex, and moving book. Later, Foerster seems to move away from the subject of the first poems. "It's come to this," he writes at the beginning of the book's second section , "the past must be // my...