River Road

Set primarily in a garden alongside a tidal river in Maine, River Road maps the troubled path of a middle-aged man torn between longing for an idealized past that never existed and realizing he must remain vulnerable to a future of love.

"Abundance. That is what comes to mind when I read the poems in Richard Foerster's River Road. Their textures dazzle with a finely-wrought music one wouldn't think possible anymore. They recall the lush yet deceptive romanticism found in the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a romanticism which, when pruned away, reveals the most unsettling truths. Despite the connection Foerster's voice is decisively his own. "For now, I am nowhere but here" he tells us in "route 1, Mile 0." The admission is readily apparent in all of these poems. Immediate, generous, and ruthlessly honest, they exploit tensions in the simultaneous presence and absence that marks a fully-lived life, a life where "negative space informs / a canvas" ("Absences"), where experience, clogged with detail, with items on "all those summer menus" ("Boozed"), can be so easily forgotten in the face of one's struggle to make sense of the present moment. Their gorgeous surfaces beckon and allure with the aim of ultimately leading us to a place we would not have visited otherwise, a place, however, we are meant to see. These are poems of the highest order." - Tony Leuzzi author of The Burning Door. , "Richard Foerster's poems are thoroughly experienced, yet tempered with a basic innocence that lends them vulnerability and freshness. His skill at rendering visual phenomena is reminiscent of Moore's or Bishop's, and it is bolstered by finely managed acoustics. A certain gravity that is not quite sadness sets the tone throughout this book, in poems that are "too lofty and original to rage," hence all the more likely to move the reader." - Alfred Corn, author of Unions, "The one unifying aspect of all Foerster's poetry is simple curiosity, a natural passion for inquiry. Foerster seems always able to absorb himself within the object of the poem itself and to approach each poem -- and each book -- as both conundrum to be wrestled with and a predicament from which to learn. He bears the tradition of his contemporary forebears (James Merrill springs to mind) but does not only in the sense of producing work that is original, sometimes startling, always fresh." - P.H. Liotta author of Rules of Engagement

Richard Foerster is the author of Sudden Harbor, Patterns of Descent, Trillium, Double Going, The Burning of Troy, and Penetralia (Texas Review Press, 2011). Recipient of numerous honors, including the “Discovery”/The Nation Award, Poetry magazine’s Bess Hokin Prize, a Maine Arts Commission Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and two NEA poetry fellowships, he lives on the coast of Southern Maine.