Adamantine by Naomi Foyle

Adamantine by Naomi Foyle

In Adamantine, award-winning poet Naomi Foyle demonstrates again her dazzling formal range, and broadens her stubborn commitment to the truths of female experience. Deploying visual poetry, free verse, sonnets, the ballad and spoken word rhythms, the book’s opening sequence honours the achievements of outstanding women from Mohawk writer and performer Tekahionwake and Canadian painter Emily Carr to Anglo-Irish revolutionaries Eva Gore-Booth and Constance Markievicz; and eulogises unsung heroines including the prematurely deceased writer Emily Givner, the mothers and orators of West Belfast, and Pamela Jean George, a murdered young Aboriginal woman from Foyle’s home province of Saskatchewan. Developing Foyle’s concern with the Middle East, so evident in her acclaimed second collection The World Cup, from troubled reflections on political violence spring tributes to Palestinian and Israeli prisoners of conscience – and to Arabic poetry. Elsewhere, a vividly imagined conversation between Old Testament wives imbues the collection with a deeper historical resonance, while personal pilgrimages lead the reader from chanteuse Nico’s graveyard in Berlin to the mass crematorium of Grenfell Tower. In its riveting combination of theatrical flair and emotional vulnerability, the book’s final sequence, The Cancer Breakthrough, recalls the imagistic pyrotechnics of Foyle’s PBS Recommended debut collection The Night Pavilion, but also pays homage, not just to the poet’s resilience and relentless creativity, but the power of loving community.

"Adamantine, an especially appropriate title, for Naomi Foyle’s collection of unsparing compassions, prepares us for the spirit here, one “incapable of being broken, dissolved, or penetrated” the epigram that prefaces the book tells usThese are poems of a committed intellect, political, well-traveled, resilient. We move through multiple cities, towns, continents — Saskatchewan, Canada, Grenfell Tower, England, Belfast, Palestine, Africa — as idioms and varying registers speak their kinship with departed loved ones, Biblical and pagan deities, the story of 'the murdered Aboriginal woman,' the Canadian painter Emily Carr, the young Palestinian activist, Ahed, to name some of the lives that inhabit Foyle’s brilliantly wrought verse. Fierce empathies put a lens on the seemingly inexhaustible ways we have proven our “'failure to care for each other,' yet the collection sings the myriad ways our stricken bodies, economies, and corruptions also, still, bind us." —Adrianne Kalfopoulou, author of A History of Too Much

"In this vibrant and wide-ranging collection, Naomi Foyle explores the turmoil of the world and the turmoil of the body. Narrative and lyric poems range from the tragedies and injustices of Grenfell Tower, Palestine and First Nation stories, to experiences of cancer and remission. The poems employ a skillful variety of forms from totem shapes to villanelles, while eavesdropping on and inhabiting the voices and obsessions of the twenty-first century.  Always aware of the paradoxes of global politics and the self, Foyle celebrates our will to survive in the face of poverty, war, prejudice and illness. Sometimes reflective, formal and intimate, sometimes as quick-paced and street-wise as a beat poet, Foyle writes with passion, grace and wit. The cumulative effect is of protest but even more of gratitude and compassion, a valuing of what makes us human." —Stephanie Norgate, author of Hidden River and The Blue Den

"This collection sees our life as it is now, a fragile veil hanging in front of what was lost. Foyle's Adamantine is a lithographic stone, fixing patterns of brutality, innocence, and pain onto the veil. But there is hope here too, as it shows us the joy of what we can become, if only we have the courage to tear through that thin shroud." —Fawzia Muradali Kane

An award-winning British-Canadian poet, essayist, editor, verse dramatist and science fiction novelist, Naomi Foyle has presented her work in venues from Berlin to Babylon, Iraq. Naomi’s poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies including Poetry Review, The London Magazine, Washington Square Review, Poetry Ireland Review and The Poetry of Sex (Viking/Penguin); Her debut collection The Night Pavilion, an Autumn 2008 Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was followed by The World Cup and two pamphlets, all from Waterloo Press. Also the editor of A Blade of Grass: New Palestinian Poetry (Smokestack Books) and author of five science fiction novels, Naomi Foyle lives in Brighton, UK, and lectures at the University of Chichester. Among her many accolades, for her poetry and essays about Ukraine she received the 2014 Hryhorii Skovoroda Prize

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781906309411
ISBN 10	1906309418
Title	Adamantine
Author	Naomi Foyle
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Pighog
Year published	2019-08-22
Number of pages	90
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable