The Flame Tree

David E. Kemp, a former drama professor at Queen’s University, is the
author of The Pleasures and Treasures of the United Kingdom.

Clarise Foster spent 10 years living in the South Pacific. When she was
12, her father took a teaching position on the island of Guam, and the
family accompanied him. Foster’s brother, to whom the book is
dedicated, died of AIDS in 1990; it is Guam that provides a significant
context for her memories of him as well as of her childhood.

The poems in this collection are deeply personal and hold nothing back.
“The Clarity of Winter,” “Grey,” and “When I Have Not Slept”
are among those poems in which the anguish of loss is gently but
unflinchingly faced. Other poems deal with aspects of childhood and
growing up—of playing, of walking, and of leaving home.

In Foster’s revealing afterword, we learn about Guam, about the
Chamorros people who originally inhabited the island, and about the
years of foreign occupation—Spanish, American, and Japanese—that has
led to the near extinction of the Chamorros culture and ethnic heritage.
During the Second World War, living conditions under the Japanese
occupation were unspeakable. The efforts by American troops to regain
Guam in 1944 were costly in terms of lives lost and are chronicled by
Foster in such poems as “Guam Island Highway,” “Bombs,” and
“Dededo.”

Foster’s poems have a maturity and emotional power that are rare in a
first collection, but what lifts this book well above the ordinary is
the remarkable symbiosis between subject and location.