Everything We Need: Poems from El Camino

by Laura Davies Foley

These vibrant poems probe not just the five-sensual and emotional hiking of Camino de Santiago, but an ineffable sixth sense. The seeking is not religious, “unbelieving, I pray,” but a pilgrimage into mysteries of self, why the poet and her wife put their comfort and health at risk, “the suffering we chose,” vs. the cancer coda, which they survive by taking agency, by naming that trial a second Camino they must master in their larger quest, with that un-nameable sixth sense. They find “everything we need, in our legs,/and beating hearts,” yet still, we don’t know why. Their Camino is a test of faith in self, in life, and something universal, “our will to keep going, a mysticism we can believe,” yet never fully apprehend, “grateful to our bodies and minds,/for letting spirit through.”

61 pages, Paperback

First published February 27, 2022

About the author

Laura Foley is the author of five poetry collections. The Glass Tree won the Foreword Book of the Year Award, Silver, and was a Finalist for the New Hampshire Writer’s Project, Outstanding Book of Poetry. Joy Street won the Bi-Writer’s Award. Her poems have appeared in journals and magazines including Valparaiso Poetry Review, Inquiring Mind, Pulse Magazine, Poetry Nook, Lavender Review, The Mom Egg Review and in the British Aesthetica Magazine. She won Harpur Palate’s Milton Kessler Memorial Poetry Award and the Grand Prize for the Atlanta Review’s International Poetry Contest.

Reviews

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am always moved by the depth of Laura Foley’s poems that chronicle the extraordinary of the ordinary of a life’s journey.