https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/laura-foley/its-this/
A richly realized set of poems about the majesty of the present.
Foley interrogates the speed of life in her latest poetry collection.
Set in changing seasons and landscapes of New England, these poems are replete with reminders of time’s passage—whether the speaker chooses to confront them or not. Sometimes they opt for the latter, as when they spy the skeleton of a deer on the roadside in “Intuition”: “I...didn’t stop to wonder / where the flesh had gone… / Didn’t pause to ponder / its change from leaping-warmth / to cold, clean bones.” Other moments provide space for meditation on the fleeting quality of life, referring to a game of Scrabble, a Zen ordination, or a poetry group meeting for the first time since the death of a friend. Foley seems to have a soft spot for nature’s smallest creatures, and they often help to bring out her deeper feelings. “Ode to a Wasp” elegizes an insect that’s drowned in hot chai. Other speakers peer into a hive of numerous bees they keep on their property (“Of Thirty Thousand”) or buy lilies for a monarch butterfly who hasn’t migrated south. (A subsequent poem mourns the insect’s passing: “face pressed into the New Year’s daisy / I gave him, as a human lover might.”) Serious events evoke even greater expressions of wonder and fear. A mother’s stroke transforms a speaker from an atheist back to a religious believer in “Radiance”: “it sent me / to my knees pleading, / hands clasped like a penitent / or a medieval saint transported / to the modern age.” Multiple poems chronicle moments with a young granddaughter, providing ways of thinking about the past, present, and future all at once.
Foley has a superb eye for the encapsulating image, the pivotal instant. Her lyrics capture worlds that others might overlook, as in “Lost and Found,” which chronicles a high school field trip to tide pools on the Massachusetts shore. The young narrator is so enraptured by the pools and their contents that they miss the ostensible lesson. Back at school, the speaker ponders: “I couldn’t calculate the pitch of waves, / or chemical composition of anything, / but I knew how to lose myself / in the world of tiny shifting things.” The verses are spare and measured, but even the shortest manages to craft emotionally resonant narratives. The wider world occasionally intrudes—the speaker’s perspective is shifted by hearing a Somali refugee give a talk or by thinking about migrant children separated at the border—but generally, the social circle is small and the natural world close at hand. Though the threat of loss—of people, of memories—is always circling, the greatest risk is failing to live in the moment, every precious second of it. In “The Orchard on Its Way,” for example, the poet limns the fleetingness of a train journey with hallmark elegance: “I wish it would slow / not the train…but the passing / into memory—I want it all / to last.”
A richly realized set of poems about the majesty of the present.
