“The twenty seven linked poems of Dark Card, winner of the2007 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook award, turn on the poet’s experience of raising her son, born with Asperger’s syndrome. The narrative arc travels from grief and white-hot anger, to Foust’s difficulty in accepting all aspects of her child’s disability, opening finally onto transformative acceptance-- a state of grace, perhaps. The resonance of recurring themes and images help mould this collection into an almost novelistic whole.
Foust shows us her gifted, afflicted child as he is. We learn about the syndrome’s manifestations, the child’s neurological deficits, the wrong-headed practices of institutions responsible for him. When, in the title poem, the boy creates a scene at school, we are shown the coping mechanisms of his mother, as well: she plays the “dark card of the idiot savant … /…It’s my ploy to exorcise their pitchforks and torches/… But it’s a swindle, a flimflam, a lie/ a not-celebration of what he sees/with his inward-turned eye:/the patterns in everything---”
The poet’s emotions overflow the page. She rages against the possible sources of her son’s syndrome. Like a tongue to a tooth, the author worries “…that Gordian- knot neck-throttled curse, /that gene-encrypted, linked-chain curse,//that DES-taken-by-his grandmother curse,/that fumble-fingered-fool-doctor-shaped curse…” . She spits out her indictments in diatribes worthy of the name. Her anger hits its target in “Palace Eunuch”:
Don’t say you were trying to be kind,
you ball-less prick soft dick eunuch
cowardly coin-counting conservator.
You were practically pissing yourself
in your fear of malpractice,
you were shaking in your green paper booties.
These poems show the many ways in which the quality of life argument is entirely subjective. We see how the boy’s behaviors set him apart and make him singular, but we get a rounder view here than in disability poetry purely from the patient’s POV (The Hospital Poems by Jim Ferris comes to mind). In one of the best poems, “Asperger Ecstasy,” Foust observes the activities that make her son “vibrate with joy.” “It can be tying flies under a microscope, knot patterns / the size of this period. 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.” As she makes peace with his differences, she begins to celebrate them: “He makes/ meaning from acorns,/ the sky,/knotted bits/ of string.” (The Visitation) We watch her empathy swell. She makes us believe her when she says that her son “loves who he is.”
Foust’s use of poetic devices is as expert as her emotional spectrum is varied. Her line breaks reveal meaning in fresh ways, and her use of sound is a mark of her craft---the sustained vowels throughout “Instrument,” the single word lines in the final strophe of “Firstborn,” echoing the child’s first thin breath; the compound words that heighten the passion in her teeth-gnashing rants. There are allusions to Emily Dickinson’s feathered hope and Temple Grandin’s empathy, and Foust raises the hair on the reader’s arm when she says about her baby, “You freeze my heart to stone/when I measure your foot with my thumb.”(No Longer Medusa).
The author reconciles the grim with the hopeful in Dark Card, and her voice never wavers in its fierce emotional honesty. And when, in the extraordinary final poem, the recurring image of her son’s Gordian knot “unravels with his years, unwinds, unfolds,/lets loop out in vast uncoiling spirals/whole archives of text,/found worlds,” we are moved. The poet has succeeded in making the personal universal. We close the covers, uplifted by Rebecca Foust’s courage and her compassionate song.”
cherylsnell wrote this review Wednesday, August 27 2008.
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