"The Burning of Troy was catalyzed by the rapid death of Richard Foerster's partner of fifteen years. These verses are a universal voicing of confrontation with mortality as well as a personal testament of loss. Foerster consciously employs distancing voices and devices, including references to Homer and Virgil as well as to Neolithic and Aboriginal cosmologies, among others. As always in Foerster's poetry, there is an attention to the natural world with its hidden symbolic and metaphysical resonances. The book's three sections form a multilayered progression, as the "I" becomes a bereaved hero who ventures beyond his personal grief into the larger world of history. The Burning of Troy has been selected winner of the Poetry Category for the 2007 Maine Literary Awards."--Publisher's website.