Goodbye, Silver Sister

Goodbye, Silver Sister, Jeanne Foster's second collection of po-ems, opens with a series of poems about a girl coming of age in pre-Katrina New Orleans, informed and haunted by the magic of the city. The powerful Pearl River forms the dividing line be-tween adulthood and other worlds, both geographic and existen-tial: "death, divorce, and the thousand other ways I would lose faith in the breastplate of love."

The collection is also an elegy for and tribute to the poet's par-ents, who met in the WPA Artists' Project. Through her poems she keeps them alive and is also able to say good-bye. Like the work of her mentor, James Wright, these poems reach far beyond the personal in their willingness to look at the un-seemly sides of being human within the context of a profound spiritual search.