JOSEPHINE FOSTER - Graphic As A Star

"A un cuore in pezzi

Nessuno osi avvicinarsi

Senza l'alto privilegio

Of having suffered just as much"

(Emily Dickinson, poem 1704)

With purity of intent and innate, discreet grace Josephine Foster offers a personal and unprecedented reading of Emily Dickinson's intense and solitary poetics, managing – no easy feat – to render those "syllables of silk" of the great American poet (a most fitting definition coined by Stefania Felicioli), that immense force so often woven on warps of rough analysis and wefts of diaphanous tenderness.

"The Abyss has no biographers"

The songs on this album (also available on vinyl: a far more attractive format) are small, spectral, melancholy gems, sung by voice alone or accompanied by acoustic guitar and sometimes harmonica, built around a core made up of Emily Dickinson's lyrics.

From the opening "Trust In The Unexpected", which Devendra Banhart might have written with his heart swollen with emotion for William Kidd, through to the following "How Happy Is The Little Stone", Josephine's stylistic choice is already clear: she moves with delicacy and respect, transfiguring the mystery of Dickinson's reclusive life and bending it toward an essential, desert-like folk that, much like certain images of rural America in John Ford's films, elevates Emily Dickinson's isolated Massachusetts to a Promised Land: a new Jerusalem transplanted with Blakean visionary spirit onto the Appalachian Mountains rather than onto perfidious Albion; and every path a spectral liturgical gesture.

"If mortal lips could sense

The unexpressed weight of a syllable

The moment it was spoken

It would crumble beneath its own weight"

(Emily Dickinson, poem 1709)

"Beauty Crows Me Till I Die" seems to carry within it the genetic heritage of Shirley Collins and the research she carried out, together with her late sister Dolly, into that vocal essentiality of the purest tradition, rigor and grace joined in a rare union. Nonetheless, the spiritual asceticism of this and other songs like "Wild Nights – Wild Nights!" burns in the heart like a campfire: the voice alone, the original instrument, to borrow Joan La Barbara's phrase, extracts, transplants these small gems out of time, which seems to bend, a mutating signifier. "Ah Tenerife", having learned the lesson of Banhart's deserts, hurls itself into a timeless, spaceless aura, carrying its vocal suggestions toward a melancholy introspection of unusual depth and cultured admiration, even managing to embrace realms of improbably shared unconscious: one of the best of the twenty-six tracks that make up this little masterpiece.

The folk guitar, played with the distracted intent of a lucid vision of sonic planes, accompanies songs in which the legacy of Joan Baez, of Dylan, or even of Lawrence Hammond and his Coyotes is evident, complete with harmonica: "Tell As A Maskman – Were Forgotten" is a wonderfully successful example of this.

An extraordinary album, poetic needless to say, courageous, extreme and singular.

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11/02/2010