I’m fascinated by poetry and why there are so many people who write it and so few poems which achieve a level of ‘ah, ahness’.  To write poetry seems to be almost a hard-wired element of being human, the need to express the sometimes overwhelming feelings and awe of being alive in this world of beauty, sadness, love, loss, and daily miracles and to do so in this particular art form rather than painting or writing prose.

Laura Foley, a Vermont neighbor, Columbia English graduate degree holder, grandmother, and late in life lover of her wife, has written a book that fairly bursts with all of these elements.  Whether sitting on her Pomfret hill in all four seasons or gazing into a tidal pool in Maine with her granddaughter, I imagine all of her senses experiencing the world in a heightened way and then finding the strength and insight to convert those feelings and observations into words we call poems.

This is a lovely volume which I read twice straight through, jotting notes and circling lines and stanzas in pencil for later review.  The thing about poetry is that when it works, one would like to quote and note the whole book, and this book works.  Here are a few of my favorites:  In “Breaking Free: Zen Ordination” she writes “….Driving home after two weeks,/breathing freely, you find your new self stuck in traffic,/ smiling and not smiling in almost equal degree” picking up on Jung’s  quote that serves as an epigraph to this poem, “If you are free of illusion, life is worthwhile and not worthwhile in almost equal degree”.   I love the opening lines of “To See It”:  “We need to separate/to see the life we’ve made” which refers to her climbing the hill by her house to “look back and see,/on the hilltop, our life,/lit from the inside.”

I could go on and on (e.g. in “An Ordinary Sunday” she thinks back on her father after “I wait for worries to relax their hold, for my mind/to become one with the cloud’s calm drifting.”

This is a lovely book—very Vermont, very real, and very accessible, just the way I love poetry.