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Here Foley distils much of his influential earlier research on oral poetry in order to reach a non-specialist audience. In this respect the book is remarkably successful, presenting many of Foley's key ideas in lucid, jargon-free prose. Foley is keen to widen the definition of oral poetry as it was established by oral-formulaic theorists such as Lord, Parry and Milman, to become a more inclusive category. In order to do this he puts forward a four-fold taxonomy of oral poetry that includes “oral performance”: verse composed in front of an audience (to the traditionalist, the only definition of oral poetry); “voiced texts”: poems composed on the page, but specifically in order to be performed later; “voices from the past”: poems such as Beowulf and The Odyssey that appear to behave, at least partly, as if they were composed orally, but about which the evidence is difficult to reconstruct; “written oral poems”: poems written for the page, but which imitate, or draw on, a set of conventions for oral poetry. Other key ideas, such as the oral word as a “unified utterance”, rather than a textual or lexical word, and “Immanent Art” as a way of reading that does not treat oral-formulaic composition as mechanistic, are explained engagingly and with admirable clarity.

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