James W. Foley Jr., who on his passing in 1939 was eulogized as “North Dakota’s unofficial poet laureate,” has always intrigued me. Not because of sublimity as a poet, although sometimes he surprises you with poems like “The Passing of the Prairie” or “The Garden of Yesterday.” More often he lapses into faux-vernacular rhetoric that doesn’t age well. Sometimes he descends to cynicism. Overall his contemporary, Clell Gannon, is a better poetic exponent of the children of the pioneers on the northern plains.