In this sixth collection, the award-winning poet Richard Foerster probes the innermost recesses of awareness not only to confront deep-seated fears of mortality, moral failure and abandonment by a beloved but also to celebrate the mystery of our tenuous existence within Nature's uncompromising order. In "Penetralia" language itself ultimately becomes the necessary ceremonial means by which the poet acknowledges and honors the terrifying sacredness that resides everywhere within. Ranging across landscapes both real and mythic, from New England gardens to a tomb in ancient Egypt, these new poems are radiant and wise.
"Foerster's poems are . . . lush, gorgeous, and technically adept . . . brilliant, emotionally complex, and moving. . . ."--Kevin Prufer
" C]ompressing story to revelatory moment and pressing the boundaries of sentence with sinuous syntax, Foerster's poems] push their narrative into the realm of lyric."-- Sarah Kennedy
"Foerster is a nature poet of the first order, and we are eventually trained and vaulted into new vision, a higher level of seeing."--John Hoppenthaler