An Old Soul

At nearly 40 years old, Jeanne Robert Foster published a collection of poetic portraits of people of the Adirondacks who remained lodged (pun intended) in her memory. To me, her poetic narratives are much more meaningful and vivid than her adaptations of folk tales, which present the people who comprise the Adirondack experience from a distance.

Many of Foster's poems focus on men who are foolish (i.e. Ben Enoch), have some sort of infirmity (i.e. "The Hunchback"), are weak (i.e. Ezra Brown), are fatally emotional (i.e. "The Coward") and/or have failed in some way, such as the husband in "The Mother"; these men are singled out because of their idiosyncracies, as Foster is as a female poet. These poems reflect the way Foster is not totally comfortable with being woman in her place and times, or rather, she is not comfortable with the way she is expected to uphold certain roles as a woman. Contrarily to poems about subtly effeminate men are bold poems from the perspective of elderly women: "Her Flowers" and "The Sane Woman". These poems of completely dialogue involve woman who are aversive to doctors (the woman in "Her Flowers" died because she did not want the doctor to look at her breast, and "The Sane Woman" aimed to convince her doctor that she was not crazy), and display an easily misunderstood love for people in their life. The woman in "Her Flowers" transported flowers from graves to her garden, identifying them with a deceased person. The "sane woman" explains how she makes peace with the people in pictures on the walls; when they mock her old age, she fights back and faces the noise. These anonymous women are ostensibly strong despite that they have gone through a lot, seen people go in and out of their life. Yet, they can empathize with the dead and the people of yesterday, the people whose spirits live on only in their memory and their odd activities. Fosters poems show that sometimes the people that seem the most incapable and odd are the ones who love the most.