Your Form Became My Own

"There is another world, but it is in this one," wrote Paul Eluard, and Jeanne Foster's numinous, visionary poems in Your Form Became My Own illustrate this insight better than any I know. Deeply felt, elegantly articulated, and brilliantly imaginative, they are set in Italy, California, and the American Gulf Coast of her youth. On the one hand, she is writing a religious poem, and at the same time a love poem. Foster's gift is to witness again and again the timeless in a single glimpse. Her focus is pure, her language of a compelling originality, beauty, and exactness, and her metaphors have the authority of facts. She affirms a mutable, animated, and personal world with a prayerful candor that I have not seen since reading the Italian poems of her mentor, James Wright. -Rodney Jones

Jeanne Foster's marvelous poems live in what the psychoanalyst DW Winnicott called the potential space between the self and other. What we find there-love, loss, madness, God-is evoked not as languid dreamscape but in sharply chiseled images: A foot the shape of the Amati Violin, a father who speaks a language / known to doves. The presences in these poems are saturated with absence, while an almost-lover becomes an ineffable, but somehow consoling, presence.

-David Shaddock, author of Poetry and Psychoanalysis: The Opening of the Field

A collection of great originality and beauty, marvelous details and strong feelings; somehow under the spell of Montale in its mysteriousness and Italian setting. I like the plot of the ghost lover. Jeanne Foster's poetry holds within it the small-a baby lizard-and the great-the roofless skeleton of the church of San Galgano: the ceiling sweeping strokes / of pure blue ether- / open soul.

-Bianca Tarozzi