When Sleep Comes: Shillelagh Songs

by Jack Foley

Poetry. California Interest. In his new poetry collection, Jack Foley revels in a wild and varied display bringing together many styles and preoccupations, from the depths of grief to love to the heights where light has its source. We might turn the title into a question: When sleep comes, can light be far behind? The diversity of forms and themes in this collection amply demonstrate Foley's concept of mind as being not one but multiple, a dark cinematic chamber peopled with many voices and masks. Foley is our contemporary vaudeville performer, tap dancing on his own stage and singing in multiple voices with many a nod and shake to poets alive and dead.

200 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 2020

Reviews

[Wayne Pounds · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Song of Himself
In his introduction to this endlessly surprising and endlessly procreating collection of poems, Jack Foley discusses Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” focusing on Walt’s constant search to name the kind of poetry he is writing and performing. The word Whitman chooses is "song" and so his great opening aria is “Song of Myself.” As is almost always the case when a later poet seizes on an earlier poet as exemplum, the later poet is talking about himself. So we are safe to say that this is Foley introducing us to Foley, Foley the poet of original exuberance who sings himself in a multitude of voices and celebrates the very multiplicity of being himself. “I and this mystery,” Walt said. Jack says the same. In the present collection, the idea may be caught in the Shillelagh song that speaks of “the dark / Irishman / of my imagination.”

Foley’s often quoted as saying that “some parts of the mind don’t know what other parts are doing.” Perhaps he fears that many of his readers haven’t read Freud. Or he may have said that at some moment when one of his selves was wearing an academic hat. All it means is “I and this mystery.”

What we find in Foley is an original exuberance that reminds us of Walt, though the voice is now filtered through an additional century’s experience of the United States and of other nations. The voice has also acquired a linguistic sophistication not available to Walt, since linguistics as a science first matures in the twentieth century. Walt called Leaves of Grass a language experiment. Foley’s work also fits that rubric.

Here in Oakland
Far from Shillelagh
I sing some songs
From the new world--
Seeds (siol)

Remembering the
Old

In 2020 Bob Dylan wrote a song called “I Contain Multitudes.” We are not through with Whitman yet, nor are we through with Jack Foley. He is large, he contains multitudes. Keep the cradle of poetry rocking, Jack.