Pharmaka: Poems by G. M. Foster completed in 2008. Pharmaka (to us chemicals and drugs) was to the ancient Greeks a person who was invested with the crimes and pollution of a community and then expelled. Thus, the Pharmaka healed the city by bearing the burden for all. "These poems are my pharmacopoeia. Some represent encounters in the flesh, so to speak; others took place in my imagination; all have been important to me. They haunt me, and in a sense I haunt them." G. M. Foster (1941-2008) began writing poetry in the mid-1950s and published in many magazines. An active participant in the...