POEMS
> Poems from New and Selected Poems
After a lifetime of reading poetry and marking the poems I like in poetry collections (though only lightly and only with a pencil), it eventually occurred to me that many of these poems had something in common – they were all expressions of delight and zest, delight in solitude, love, people, activities, places, things, nature, cities or just free-floating exhilaration. These are the poems I keep going back to, reading one every now and then for a quick boost, or, rather, not so much reading as snorting.
Eventually I collected these into a personal anthology and will make them available one at a time as Poem of the Week.
So if you enjoy getting high come and snort a few lines with me.
BOOK REVIEWS
THE WHOLE THING, MICA PRESS 2023
‘What an extraordinary outburst – latter-day Lucretius – post-Brexit Pythagoras – Anaximenes’ Annex! Bewildered and enlightened I have been diving in and out of The Whole Thing – swept along by its momentum and refreshing myself at the arias that punctuate the swinging recitative – lyrical oases. There are many lovely lines throughout and stanzas submerged like rocks in the rapids.’
Michael Longley
True Life Love Stories, Blackstaff Press 1976
“Deliberate, glaring, but also vivacious and lively … Foley has candour, verve, mischief and tastelessness. His verse drives colloquially forward. Few poets alive are up to this sort of impertinence.”
The GO Situation, Blackstaff Press 1982
“Pungent, witty, perceptive poems about the dreams and dilemmas of lower-middle-class males ... like Larkin, only sharper, funnier.”
The Irish Frog, Ulsterman Publications 1978
“The Irish Frog is a series of adaptations from the French of Laforgue, Rimbaud and Corbière. They are clearly based on the French but Foley has transformed them into his own. Those who have read … True Life Love Stories will recognise the style – a witty clash between an elevated poetic tone and idiomatic naturalism. You either like this sort of stuff or you loathe it. I love it, and The Irish Frog, because of its consistency of origin, tone and quality, is particularly pleasing.”
Insomnia in the Afternoon, Blackstaff Press 1994
“In this substantial book his real talent explodes, taking on the long line, informing it with a huge freight of modern bric-à-brac and suddenly allowing himself to use the rhetoric and symbolism hitherto self-denied, at once more playful and more serious. There is a boldness and confidence in his new style, a willingness to play with Yeatsian rhetorical excess, with Japanese compression, with French symbolism, with American expansion, while hanging on to his very personal vision. Accomplishment, accomplishment!”
Autumn Beguiles the Fatalist, Blackstaff Press 2006
“Michael Foley’s poems marry irresistible narrative with the sort of irreverent exuberance that carries all before it … and in the final section, in which Foley confronts the age-old poetic subject of mortality, wit fuses with a melancholy theme to produce a memorable series of poems, at once urgent and uplifting, that demand to be reread.”
New and Selected Poems, Blackstaff Press 2011
“a marvelous book … engaging and challenging. Close observation, high vocabulary, acerbic humour … and a strong sense of the absurd are Foley’s hallmarks.”