Boy on a Doorstep: New and Selected Poems - Richard Foerster
In this beautiful book, Richard Foerster gathers together his poems of elegance and grace. For decades Foerster has carved a place for himself in American poetry, with his precise and metrical lines that engage subjects as small as a vesper sparrow or as momentous as Mozart’s death. His range is enormous. Foerster is an aestheticist, searching for the beautiful in the world despite the pervasiveness of grief and death. These are poems that push the reader to look out at the world we live in and ponder “how well fear has taught [us] not to see something wondrous,” and yet we must see despite fear, the poems say, for the wondrous is all around. Foerster provokes us to understand “that this is how the spirit shines, if it must shine at all, at the body’s awful going.” Profound words to heed from this urgent and necessary collection.
—Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of The Second O of Sorrow
ISBN 978-17329012162019$18.95RICHARD FOERSTER was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1949, the son of German immigrants. His numerous honors include the “Discovery”/The Nation Award, Poetry magazine’s Bess Hokin Prize, a Maine Arts Commission Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and two National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowships—as well as two Maine Literary Awards for Poetry. He lives in a former church in Eliot, Maine, with his partner, the artist Douglas Taylor.
