COLLISIONS

Octogenarian JackFoleys COLLISIONS is a book at play in the forests of the mind. The opening quotation from Dana Gioia defines the books understanding of consciousness: Human consciousness is an unstable republic of conflicting impulses, instincts, and appetites in perpetual flux. COLLISIONS is an attempt to honor that notion of the chaos of consciousness while at the same time giving the reader an experience of thought and feeling that is not so chaotic that it is overwhelming. It tries to tell the truth about the mind in a way that feels if not comfortable at least familiar: we too have felt that fire, that movement. The book asserts that the fundamental condition of poetry is words in motion, constantly dis/uncovering perceptions of the new. Ecstasy seems to be linked to the instability of language. Familiar with the many forms of traditional poetry and comfortable with the making of new forms,Foleyconceives of every living poet as an Orpheus attempting to rescue poetry-as-Eurydice. If poetry to some extent reveals the ramifications of the poets identity, it does so in the context of the coruscations of words whose flashes move beyond identity into something more. The book deliberately plunges us into mystery as everything collides with everything else.Foleywrites to a fellow poet, Home is where you belong but home isnt anywhere: it is always a profound absence: sound, noise that reaches for the ever-receding light. I think that, underneath all the influences, is this deep longing which is always asserted and always denied. Baudelaire: heaven or hell who cares / In the depths of the unknown to find something new.