[Issue #15, Summer 2008]
Dark Card
By Rebecca Foust
Texas Review Press, 2008
Reviewed by Bob Wake
The strongest poems in Rebecca Foust's chapbook Dark Card are so
very good that they carry the collection as a whole and lift the lesser
poems by sheer force of brio. Working to powerful effect is the chapbook's
thematic unity. Foust's now-grown son has Asperger's Syndrome, a neurological
disorder on the autism spectrum. The twenty-seven poems touch on the poet's
journey from rage to acceptance and wisdom, as well as charting her son's
developmental challenges and coping strategies as he moves into adulthood.
Brilliant, but socially awkward and withdrawn, he suffers the inevitable
bullying in elementary school ("they cornered him / behind the storage
shed and stoned him / in a hail of green oranges"). Dark Card's
poems are worry beads. Plaintive prayers. Foust's love and concern for her
son are never in doubt, but the emotions on display are wounded and rubbed
raw. Sentimental or saccharine? Forget it. The author's quietest observations
are often barbed ("My son is gentler with moths / than people ever
were with him").
Foust is good at evoking for us both the outward behaviors and the inward
mental processes that constitute her son's experience of the world. In the
poem "Asperger Ecstasy," for example, she writes of the miscellany
that snare his focus and cause him to "vibrate with joy": "It
can be cataloging washing / machine brands or the note variations in a symphony,
/ or committing to memory for joyous recounting / the entire year's schedule
for the El-train." Her sense of wonder, even envy, is triggered in
the midst of what we perceive as a deeply melancholic alienation from her
son's neurology: "Oh, never to grow bored or experience a numbing /
sameness of things! To immerse consciousness / in the sensory present of
a bottle cap flattened by traffic..."
A series of six extraordinary poems ("Too Soon," "Palace
Eunuch," "That Space," "Firstborn," "Apologies
to My OB-GYN," and "No Longer Medusa") early in the volume
recount in harrowing, if at times oblique, detail what appears to have been
a premature and difficult birth. Fueled by sulfurous sarcasm and remarkably
controlled indignation, Foust unloads on incompetent medical staff and inattentive
gods alike. Her poetic rants are among the highlights of Dark Card,
typified by the opening two stanzas of "Apologies to My OB-GYN":
Sorry that my boy birthed himself
too early, took up so much room
in your prenatal nursery
with his two pounds, two ounces
and did not oblige your nurses
with easy veins.
Sorry we were such pains in your ass
asking you to answer our night calls like that,
and that he did everything so backwards:
lost weight, gained fluid
blew up like a human balloon
then shriveled.
Later poems in Dark Card shed their anger and evolve into a kind
of beatific embrace of a gifted math-whiz son who "loves who he is."
In the poem "Like Dostoyevsky's," Foust writes: "My illiterate
heart / is a mother's heart that beats / and breaks by rote, but I'm learning
/ to let him alone and to see / that his pacing and humming / are how he
keeps time / in a world made of chaos..."
The penultimate poem, "Empathy," is a lovely encomium to Temple
Grandin, famed autistic writer and researcher whose advocacy work on the
ethical treatment of farm animals has led to industry-wide reforms in livestock
handling. "Empathy" is a model of poetic precision, a complex,
fully realized mini-biography of Grandin's life as a veterinary scientist
and as a person with autism. It's also an example of how the collection's
poems, all of which stand alone as fine individual pieces, gain impact through
their juxtaposition and sequencing. Dark Card is a masterful debut
by an exceptional new poet.
Order
Dark Card From Amazon.com
______________________________
Bob Wake is editor of the Cambridge Book Review.
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