Edward Foster DISCUSSES A LOOKING-GLASS FOR TRAYTORS

A Looking-Glass for Traytors, by Edward Foster. East Rockway, New York: Marsh Hawk Press, November 2020. 88 pages. $16.00, paper.

You are invited to read a wonderful conversation between Peter Valente and Edward Foster over Edward's latest Marsh Hawk book: A Looking-Glass for Traytors. You can see the conversation hosted by Heavy Feather Review HERE, but we also share an excerpt below.

from: A Conversation with Edward Foster’s A LOOKING-GLASS FOR TRAYTORS by Peter Valente in the Heavy Feather Review (2021): 

In Foster’s poems the Beast can be understood as Pan; the quote from Walter F. Otto’s Dionysus: Myth and Cult, in the beginning of Foster’s book, states: “Dionysus, himself, who raises into the heights of ecstasy, is the suffering god. The rapture which he brings rise from the inner most stirrings of that which lives. But wherever these depths are agitated, there, along with rapture and birth, rise up also horror and ruin.” Here I mean to suggest the dark resonances that operate, in secret, deep inside these poems, manifesting their energy in the language, and are beyond good and evil. Pan stands for the dark energy of sexual desire and nonconformity. Any form of authority must be resisted. And in the end, after all is lost, and seemingly only despair remains, something remains, there, in the wind, the changing breezes, in the drifts of snow that cover the fields, in the cold, in the silence. It is dark and you cannot see where you are going. You can’t go on, but you go on. That is the closest thing to freedom. Nothing is still, all is moving. That is the god speaking. Nothing will be remembered. Even the poem itself may not be remembered.

 

For Foster there are moments in life when we can escape the ego, and emerge, as if transformed, but this is not because of the mind, but the body. For Foster, at these moments, “Suffering and the past no longer invade the soul, and nothing is left, for the moment, but freedom ‘in the tearing wind.’” This is the liberation of not being bound by anything, where you remember nothing, regret nothing, move as if outside life itself, not bound by anything anyone has ever said, or one’s memories, or any acquired knowledge; one enters oblivion, willingly; one burns with the speed of the wind, tearing through space, until one is nothing at all, stripped of everything; one is perhaps then just a pure light entering the final darkness that will consume all. Edward Foster’s A Looking-Glass for Traytors is a kind of roadmap of this forbidden territory; it is a place where the god Pan rules.