“Deliberate, glaring, but also vivacious and lively … Foley has candour, verve, mischief and tastelessness. His verse drives colloquially forward. Few poets alive are up to this sort of impertinence.”

“Pungent, witty, perceptive poems about the dreams and dilemmas of lower-middle-class males ... like Larkin, only sharper, funnier.”

“The Irish Frog is a series of adaptations from the French of Laforgue, Rimbaud and Corbière. They are clearly based on the French but Foley has transformed them into his own. Those who have read … True Life Love Stories will recognise the style – a witty clash between an elevated poetic tone and idiomatic naturalism. You either like this sort of stuff or you loathe it. I love it, and The Irish Frog, because of its consistency of origin, tone and quality, is particularly pleasing.”

“In this substantial book his real talent explodes, taking on the long line, informing it with a huge freight of modern bric-à-brac and suddenly allowing himself to use the rhetoric and symbolism hitherto self-denied, at once more playful and more serious. There is a boldness and confidence in his new style, a willingness to play with Yeatsian rhetorical excess, with Japanese compression, with French symbolism, with American expansion, while hanging on to his very personal vision. Accomplishment, accomplishment!”

“Michael Foley’s poems marry irresistible narrative with the sort of irreverent exuberance that carries all before it … and in the final section, in which Foley confronts the age-old poetic subject of mortality, wit fuses with a melancholy theme to produce a memorable series of poems, at once urgent and uplifting, that demand to be reread.”

“a marvelous book … engaging and challenging. Close observation, high vocabulary, acerbic humour … and a strong sense of the absurd are Foley’s hallmarks.”