Brett Foster and I had planned to meet for dinner on November 14, 2015; instead, I attended his funeral. I had not heard back from him in weeks about our plans and was fighting off my suspicion that he was losing his fight with colon cancer. In my last emails from him, Brett remained optimistic about his future, especially about his poetry, which was pouring steadily from his mind and heart, even as his body weakened. He announced the forthcoming publication of Extravagant Rescues as “answered prayer—good news in a bad season, indeed. And,” he added, “this is an entirely different, pre-sickness book.” The poems in this collection do not reflect Brett’s final words, but they give evidence of a perpetually significant vision, one that outlives the poet and has the power to awaken us to what is real.
The collection opens with three epigraphs that act as invitations to the reader, undulating between roars of disquiet within, silence in the world, music in the air, and the necessity to tell what you see. C. S. Lewis makes the great point that music and silence are the two things not found in hell, for inferno is pandemonium—roaring disquiet—whereas poetry is paradisal in how it plays the silence with sound. As a translator as well as a poet, Foster hears the accent of a word, its reverberations through time, how it collects meaning by the words that surround it. Like T. S. Eliot’s or W. H. Auden’s early work, Foster’s poems can be appreciated merely for their sound without pinning them down to find out what they signify. His poems pull you out of the chaotic noise of the world so that you can better attend to music and silence. Hear, for instance, this litany from “Upon News of the Important Fossil”:
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