Bøger af Laura Foley

It's This contemplates relationships, identity, love, loss, and radical transformation, finding acceptance, joy, and growing peace, as the speaker practices meditation, and falls more deeply in love with her wife.Employing spare, musical language and humor, and suffused with light, these vivid poems flash back to the speaker's past, as they practice empathy and compassion in the present - for self and others, across political aisles, and species. Learning to accept mortality in losing loved ones and chaplaining hospice patients, she increasingly appreciates what presence has to teach, in the woods of nature and relationships: everything we seek is already in us, in each shining moment we allow ourselves to focus wholly on everything present, the hologram of this, which is the universe, "this field of snow, where I sit alone/on a hilltop, until I think of nothing, / but light - light on snow, light/prisming ice, light on light, on light."

Laura Foley's "WTF" refers to her father's initials and, slyly, to the abbreviated colloquial exclamation, in a pun that laughs and cuts, in this reckoning with a fraught father-daughter relationship. These spare poems communicate more like snapshots than narrative lyrics, beginning with sympathy and gratitude, moving through disappointment, anger and resentment, without ever losing compassion, as Foley examines her father's formative WWII experiences and, consequently, how he shaped her experience and character, ending with a positive recognition of her father in herself. "I liked 'The Long View' (in the collection 'WTF') for its abundance of precise and effective details: an exact location, many poignant indicators of the subject's confined and increasingly lonely life. The tone is restrained (no pleading for sympathy) but the lines move urgently, and the pity grows with them. Many years and much sadness in the spacious apartment are made palpable in the confines of verse."-David Constantine "Laura Foley's poetry is almost unprecedentedly direct, simple, devastatingly clear... So convincing about experience."-David Ferry "Laura Foley, a master of memory as poem, brings us a portrait of tragedy, loss and longing. For those of us whose fathers were strangers, Foley's 'WTF' provides a perfect commiseration through the 'survivor's eyes' in her beautifully understated language."-John O'Connor

Each poem in this radiantly plainspoken collection offers subtle and penetrating observations that swell to a rich tapestry of ordinary life, beheld from a stance of grace and buoyancy. Starting with intimations of desire in childhood, these poems travel through ordinary domestic scenes to the blessing of a maturity in which the narrator, still embracing desire and wild promise, thrives in the midst of life's darker gifts. This collection is truly a joy to read. It puts to shame those of us who walk through our days with "the din of loneliness," ignoring life's many invitations for bliss.