Necessary Stranger

by Graham Foust

Poetry. Graham Foust's third book offers agile poems of dread and humor. Robert Creeley writes, "These poems move in close to luxuriant circles, round and round each particular syllable, neither hurrying nor dragging behind--just there. At times there seems an almost physical presence to them, a third dimension, which is substance." Foust is also the author of AS IN EVERY DEAFNESS and LEAVE THE ROOM TO ITSELF, available from SPD. He teaches Creative Writing at Saint Mary's College of California.

Genres: Poetry

65 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here's Graham Foust at mid-tempo: "A person | may see uncertain things | when in pain." Here he's neither in the allegro of sincere, a modality he generally approaches through the pastoral appropriation of unquoted song-lyrics ("it's not unusual to be loved by anyone," he lifts from Les Reed and Gordon Mills, who wrote the Tom Jones hit, using Foust's favorite trope, litotes, the double-negative of lessening), nor in the witty adagios of hyperbole ("The way the days gray | over is almost | a system || we believable slaves | blink back"), a phrase-making with a smile on it.

It's worth trying to catch out mid-tempo Foust, however, because it's possible to admire his skill while holding out some reservation about the project, and I suspect that my preference for Necessary Stranger, the third of Foust's (now) four books is a minority report. The folks who like this sort of thing seem to prefer it where else it's not so lived-in as here. The implicit claim, in the opening quote above, that the speaker is in pain, I suspect appeals to many more than it appeals to me. I take it as it is, and only wonder how such statements get into poems, and why. Foust, too, sets himself up as a critic of the sincerity he presumes is only that of "a person". However, the love poems in this volume speak to the midwestern pastoral that is Foust's most frequent mode, a jargon of authenticity taken for granted when the twenty-somethings of the Vietnam War era, from Larry Levis' The Wrecking Crew to Saint Geraud's Auto-necrophilia to Frank Stanford's The Singing Knives all worked out the cliches of that mode which was thrown into crisis by the Iowa revolt of Grenier, Watten and co. (Perhaps I will not be forgiven for the space/time metonymy of thinking it all happened at Iowa, but if we're to keep the subject poetry and music, which is Foust's gambit, not mine, then the pastoral is always-already and you're crazy if you don't think "Iowa City," as Foust names one poem here, figures significantly.)

The lessening in Foust's preferred litotes trope chastens the cliche while paying homage to the mode: "Late and unancient, inexact | as hands, I would move | as if by choice into my life," Foust tells us in "Number One Hit Song," and if I'm not too innured by the title's pastoral quip, then the volume pays off on the claim of having found a language that "moves as if by choice into" the poet's "life." The burden of the poet's belatedness, not just in relation to the midwestern surrealists invoked above, but also in relation to that realm of folk culture, including music, that was their Sixties context (where the thought of having a "Number One Hit Song" launched a thousand poetic ships) emerges in Foust's insistence on the representational crispness of seeing-into which goes into seeing. For Foust a poem is just a little slip of language that ties the psychic "real" to the world's objects in a way that resists the linguistic surfeit of pop opacity which makes him, to return to mid-tempo, "uncertain." The faith in that relationship between language's representational capacity and the psychic "real" is the premise it's easy to resist when it's insisted on in a certain "jargon" -- to resort, again, to Adorno's trope. I would defend this particular Foust title as his most distinguished because it feels most canny in its acknowledgement of such resistance.

[jess sanford · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hmm, really torn on this book. For every couple of poems that made me think 'One star', I'd hit one that floored me and reached well past even a 5-star rating.

I'm a fan of very pared-down, abstract poetry, but the pieces in this book were just hit and miss with me; sometimes I just felt like I needed a little more, while at other times things were stunning and completely took my head off.

I feel like I really need to read more of Foust's poetry, perhaps, to get a feel for him.

[Carrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this is his "humor" phase - a lot of funny going on -doesn't quite have the silence within the poems that many in leave the room to itself have altho there are some cool moments.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Not Always Love Contemporary Poetry...

It's not
that
I think it's
Pretentious...

[Sophie · Rating 4 out of 5]

feeling esoteric as hell reading this

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

the kind of poems to have in your backpack at all times

[Ericka Clou · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection uses familiar allusions and builds an edifice of restless wonder. Or maybe I projected the restlessness.

[Matthew M.]

Please see my review at Octopus: http://www.octopusmagazine.com/issue0...

[Danika · Rating 5 out of 5]

Graham Foust: kicking me right in the teeth and the gut at the same time, all week long.

[L'abbe C · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is HOT!

[KJ Shepherd · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tiring in the way only short poems can be. Nothing for me to latch onto--the glimpses are Polaroids taken from knee height. Just not for me.

That said, the shortest one--"At the Movies"--is perfect.

[Logan · Rating 3 out of 5]

More tight, enjoyable little poems with that same confidence showed in AS IN EVERY DEAFNESS. However, this book was too much of a "collection" to warrant more than 3 stars. It just wasn't as interesting as the other book.

[Andrew Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very abstract to the point of feeling like I didn't always have enough context to get comfortable in the text, but maybe that's the point of being a "necessary stranger."

[Max Maslansky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a huge poetry fan but this book opened my eyes a tad.