Goodbye, Silver Sister: Poems - Softcover

Jeanne Foster (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810131285 ISBN 13: 9780810131286

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2015

Synopsis

"Goodbye, Silver Sister," Jeanne Foster s second collection of poems, opens with a series of poems about a girl coming of age in pre-Katrina New Orleans, informed and haunted by the magic of the city. The powerful Pearl River forms the dividing line between adulthood and other worlds, both geographic and existential: death, divorce, and the thousand other ways I would lose faith in the breastplate of love. The collection is also an elegy for and tribute to the poet s parents, who met in the WPA Artists Project. Through her poems she keeps them alive and is also able to say good-bye. Like the work of her mentor, James Wright, these poems reach far beyond the personal in their willingness to look at the unseemly sides of being human within the context of a profound spiritual search."

About this title

Review

"These poems create a world in which 'Everything is kept, but nothing / is easily recovered.' Foster conjures the immediacy of childhood perception as few poets can."--Paul Breslin

"Jeanne Foster's Goodbye, Silver Sister is a heartbreaking and beautiful collection. In lines rich with creaturely detail, Foster renders both 'the common, awkward terror' and the 'forgotten beauty' of individual lives. I'm convinced that we'll be reading Jeanne Foster for many years to come."--Peter Campion

"I found much to admire in this book. The poems are intelligent and deeply felt. The voice is strong and invites the reader into every poem. Jeanne Foster has a persuasive voice and one that communicates with her readers."--Barbara Hamby

"Jeanne Foster is a poet of great originality, writing in a way that makes a reader feel he is entering deep into what Yeats called 'the labyrinth of another's being.' . . . Foster's poems are transgressive, hinting at forbidden areas of life in a very Southern, very New Orleansian way--if there is such a word. 'Ashes' is positively shocking. Tennessee Williams, another transgressive resident of New Orleans, would have applauded."--Richard Tillinghast

Edition details

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0810131285
• ISBN 13: 9780810131286
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 147