John Foy ’78

St. Augustine’s Press

April 2017

In Night Vision, wars go on in the Middle East, violence is never far away, and the creatures of the field are “much the worse/for having been beneath the rotor blades.” Written in an uncluttered idiom, these poems, technically adept, play across a range of forms in a voice that stands out for its bitter clarity and directness. They are by turns contemplative and savage, invoking Meister Eckhart but acknowledging that “we die like dogs in the deep snow.” If they offer solace at all, it’s in a plainspoken, dark humor. The result is an emotional immediacy unique in American poetry. The collection received the 2016 New Criterion Poetry Prize.