Reviews

"Laura Foley’s poetry reminds me of Louise Gluck’s in its effective use of statement and deceptively plain-seeming speech, and of Kevin Goodan’s poetry in its use of nature and in its sincerity… It’s refreshing and wonderful to read poetry that isn’t all about irony…Foley’s poems are honest, patient and full of yearning, grateful and accepting, discomfiting and comforting, all at once, and her use of imagery beautifully moving and accurate. These are words that, to paraphrase Jane Austen, pierce the soul—they are half agony, half hope."

April Ossmann, Author of Anxious Music, former Editor at Alice James Books

The Right Amount of Words: Savoring the Poetry of Laura Davies Foley 

THE THAW

Let the April rains come in.
I am a sloping hill with new buds piercing.

So opens one of the poems in MAPPING THE FOURTH DIMENSION, the 2006 collection from Laura Davies Foley. And it's one of the gentler openings in the book, but it heads toward the final lines:

I have no skin.
My hair is gone.
The candle within draws deeper.

And that solemnity, that willingness to paint loss in its sorrows as well as its potential, rings with honesty. Wherever or whenever we'll have the chance to meet and hold our dead again, the time between now and then hurts. Foley says goodbye and "I miss you" repeatedly in this collection.

Yet each poem is as different from the others as one face is from the faces around us. The poem "Exiled," for instance, proclaims absence -- then paces through walking by a lake or through winter, and at last into summer:

And in this walking,
this movement away, I came to a clearing
and received the clearing light,
the clouds moving apart, and you,
like a footprint
filling now with sand,
and the wide shore stretching on.

It fascinates me that Foley's second collection, SYRINGA, published in 2007, seems to have overlapped the first collection in gestation time -- each book mentions the other. But SYRINGA, springing from contemplation of a wounded waterbird and from a parallel contemplation of self and spirit, gathers light in great, sweet-scented armfuls and proclaims joy and blessing from these roots. Consider "A Day":

I was watching the geese sleeping.
I was watching the one
with the broken wing.
The serene one, floating in her painful knowledge.

As Foley leads the lines through patterns and shifting light, she resolves the poem with:

The ordinary is always like that.
Always ready to reveal itself
as something other.

But it isn't other.
It's just the ordinary.
And isn't that
the extraordinary thing we come to know?

In SYRINGA there waits also the sea at dusk; a five-year-old child diving; a solstice sparrow; and moments from hospice caring. The lines are generally short, the poems a page more or less, and the images unforgettable.

 Beth Kanell, Kingdom Books

 

About Syringa

I received your book and kept turning pages, turning pages, reading.  I'll definitely use it with Writing and the Creative Process (PSU course) second semester.  Wow!

Professor Lynn Chong, Plymouth State University

Mary Rees titled her book on Dhamma, BEING PRAYER. Thich Nhat Hanh equates mindfulness with the holy ghost.  Mary Oliver writes: "I don't know exactly what a prayer is, I do know how to pay attention." That's what Laura Davies Foley's poems do. They pay attention.

The poems themselves "relax and attend." They free the spirit into resiliency and breath. In so doing, certainly for their creator and potentially for their readers, the poems have the power to heal broken wings and teach them to fly.

In reading the poems in Syringa you might even feel, as Paul McCartney wrote so long ago: "All my life, I've been only waiting for this moment to arrive."

Doreen Schweizer, Guiding Teacher, Valley Insight Meditation Society

We LOVE your book of poems, Syringa.
What a wonderful poet you are! You totally speak to me!!

Annie B Bond  Executive Producer, Care2 Healthy Living, Author of Home Enlightenment

Sue Gillmor

Mapping the Fourth Dimension

"My hand reaches through the spaces to touch/ the ones who are not there,"  writes Laura Davies Foley in the title poem of this collection. These poems are eloquent about loss and silence. How does the world look once we realize it will never again be the world we want? Laura Davies Foley's poems ask that question again and again and give us the answers of a lifetime.

--Will Walker, author of Carrying Water

"In this collection of poetry, Mapping the Fourth Dimension, Laura Davies Foley meditates upon the death of a significant love with poems that are dreamy and ecstatic. Fused with the terrible knowledge that comes only with direct experience she writes: "I knew then what Dido must haveknown at her fiery end." Using direct plain language she invites the reader into her world of loss, which is simultaneously, a world suffused with hope."

--Jackson Wheeler, Founder of The Ventura Poetry Festival, Former co-editor of Solo, author of Swimming Past Iceland and contributor to  A Near Country: Poems of Loss.