Many contemporary poets have explored the landscapes of their childhoods and foreign countries in recent books, and it may seem that these subjects have been mapped so extensively that no new way into them exists. Richard Foerster’s Double Going, however, treads this familiar territory with an awareness of structure, both formal and semantic, that makes the journey a new one. Often centered on anecdote, Foerster’s poems never plod through chronological plot; compressing story to revelatory moment and pressing the boundaries of sentence with sinuous syntax, they push their narratives into the realm of lyric.
          As the title of the book suggests, many of the poems double back on personal history. A few poem titles, too–"The Lost," "Photograph of Angela, 1929," "The Weight of the Past"–reveal how focused this book is on memory, and some of the gestures, such as the shocking detail or the grisly scene, that readers have come to expect from the anecdotal poem are here. The room where the corpse of the narrator’s Aunt Angela "drained/ from sofa to floor" and the mother revealing to her son that his father once killed "a boy/ [his] age" are, in themselves, unsurprising. To rehearse the familiar elements of Foerster’s work, however, is to ignore what makes these very fine poems: understatement and syntactic virtuosity. These may seem relatively pedestrian virtues, but Foerster’s quiet weaving of controlling image and tone, as well as his twisting sentences, multiply the possible meanings of the stories that ground these poems.
          "Photograph of Angela, 1929," for example, is made up of twenty-four lines broken into two stanzas. The entire poem, however, contains only three sentences. The first stanza creates a tough, beautiful Angela, "eased back/ to jut her chin directly toward the sun," but the second sentence, which bridges the stanza break, winds its way from this "flapper smart" Angela to one posing "for whatever man/ framed her there" to the narrator’s mother, who "so despise[s]" the pose that she gives the picture to her son. The focus seems to be on Angela, whose freedom is hemmed by the danger signs of the car’s hood, "coffin-long" and the invisible but powerful photographer. The poem’s third sentence, however, brings the poem around to its other subject, the speaker’s mother, by way of the father, who smiles and says "‘damn’" at the snapshot. It’s the mother’s small, almost unnoticeable act–"from the corner/ of my eye, I saw my mother wince"–that informs, retroactively, the family picture. The male gaze and its power to wound becomes the frame through which we view not just Angela’s lonely old age but her sister’s personality as well.
          The poems in the first section, swinging between childhood recollection and adult speculation, give way in the second part to the long multi-part title poem, introduced by "The Son He Never Had." The entire section revolves around the father, the memory of whom "engender[s] this/ unorphaned brood of words." Fatherhood and its misconceptions are the topics to which this book returns again and again, so it seems especially fitting that "Double Going" should lie at its center and that its opening subsection is titled "Fists." Shorter and punchier than Foerster’s more common pentameter or hexameter, these poems use three- and four-beat lines, hammering at "the impenetrable knot" of the absent father. The poems themselves are spare, each centered on a metonymic sign: "Toolbox," "Smokes," "Solder," "Fishline," "Scotch," to name just a few. These tightly constructed–and tightly wound–poems stretch the controlling image between generations; even the body, seen reflected in "Mirror," becomes a sign of the father, and the son’s cry, "O, to erase every/ last aspect of you/ . . ./ and stand for once in clarity,/ naked and wholly alone," is never answered. In fact, the speaker recognizes that it can’t be answered, because he is making his father in his own image; the poems are "Kodaks" that are "coddled through cold acid/ baths, my mind’s blooded/ lights: I give him life."
          The book’s third and final section circles back to the lone narrator of Part 1, who wanders the world and his own past. Many of the poems are set in Europe or at "Home After Months Away." It’s the right choice for the persona of this narrator, who even at a friendly gathering on "Father’s Day in Palmyra, NY," is an outsider, "fatherless, childless." The poems in this section are more spacious, their loosely pentameter lines twisting long sentences through associative thought. Action in these poems, from the mundane wading in "Lake Winnipesaukee" to lovemaking in an abandoned farmhouse ("Snakeskin"), is tentative, because this world is fraught with hidden small dangers. A sea anemone blossoms from a "scrap of rag," and the pleasure of a night spent sleeping "chest to back, cock nuzzled/ to cleft" turns to "shock," then "fear" when a shed snakeskin is discovered draped across the headboard the next morning.
           Despite their more leisurely pace, these final poems push Foerster’s syntax to its limits. The tercets of "Glass" leap from a working, quotidian glassblower to "Gabriel, his cheeks/ ballooned," to the origins of the colors the speaker sees emerging in the glass itself–all in one sentence. The second sentence, which snakes to the poem’s end, is a sort of ars-poetica commentary on the art, not just of blowing glass, but of watching glass being blown. The completed vessel is lovely, but it’s the "mind’s fingers" that crave to hold it (emphasis added). The lyric compression of the poems in this final section also accounts for the book’s few infelicities, such as the image of the "Swimmer at the Y," the "swath" of whose "behind jackknifes/ / at each lap" and the "radiation of reason, the chemo of acceptance" squeezed into a poem about cancer ("A Bottle of Chateau d’Yquem 1966"). Happily, however, these instances are infrequent. Double Going earns the right to its complicated, multi-faceted vision because Foerster has chosen the right succession of images, thoughts, and ideas. He has also created a narrative voice we want to believe. It is not a pretty book or a comforting one. It does however, ring true to the complexities of incident and language. It refuses to avoid the risks of either mimetic narrative or unpredictable lyric and gains, in the end, the advantages of both.