Sledding the Valley of the Shadow

Foley's latest collection of poetry searches for beauty, hope, and love in the face of personal and global tribulations.... These poems, grounded in the present moment, expertly balance individual and collective experiences.

—Kirkus Reviews

In Sledding the Valley of the Shadow, Laura Foley tells the tale of how we suffer, how we are delighted, how we may triumph, and we find ourselves "immersed like otters, in the buoyancy of life on Earth, in time taking us and re-making us." Joy emerges in these poems even while Foley contemplates "another brush with the great beyond ... keening, / just outside the screen" and the reader finds herself "recalled ... time and time again." Like the speaker in "The Beauty of the Beast," we are reminded to "dare, in early heat, the scariest, /most gorgeous beach (we) know," to immerse ourselves in that "sweet coolness." These are poems of transformation and transcendence, trouble and redemption, distress and comfort where "the dark underside of the bridge becomes a riverine cathedral"-and we join the speaker "soothed by its cool shadows, floating at ease."

—Carol Potter, author of What Happens Next is Anyone's Guess

Ice Cream for Lunch:
A Grandparents Handbook

Reading Ice Cream for Lunch: A Grandparents Handbook transported me to a place of calm, a place of serenity, a place of awe. For the better part of a morning (for as soon as I finished the book, I read it again) I forgot about our troubled and troubling world and instead, remembered what a holy gift it is to spend time with those we love, especially children. Young Evelyn sees the best in everyone, teaches us to listen to the chairs, tells us when a beloved dog dies, Alys has just gone home—her old one and proclaims Grandma, you’re beautiful. Without being cloying, Laura Foley uses just the right details to capture a grandmother’s love of her three unique and remarkable grandchildren. I was absolutely charmed by this book.

—Lesléa Newman, author of I Carry My Mother and I Wish My Father

Laura Foley once again, and in the unwavering clarity we have come to expect from her poetry, teaches us how to navigate life—but this time, in the companionship of Evelyn, Eleanor and Milo. At once funny, tender, wise and generous, Foley translates the worlds of her grandchildren, inviting us to recognize Santa in the garbage truck driver, the Queen in the white-haired lady on the park bench, even the magnificence of our own aging bodies… The most important thing I learn from my granddaughter, Foley writes, is I’m here! I’m here! I’m here!

—Brooke Herter James, winner of the Fish Poetry Prize

In Ice Cream for Lunch: A Grandparents Handbook—a cornucopia of tenderness and delight in gentle, quiet poems—Laura Foley manages to convey the delicious sweetness and poignancy of grandparenthood without ever surrendering to the temptation to be maudlin or cloying. She knows both joy and sorrow are holy, expressing a deep reverence for the lives and lived experience of her young grandchildren in direct, spare language; she is always steeped in the wonder I don’t let go. Finally, she offers the reader the freedom to loose the ribbons of ourselves to the spirit of the wind. Those who have grandchildren will resonate with the newness, the pleasure, and the ache inherent in that relationship; those who do not will wish they did.

—James K. Zimmerman, author of The Further Adventures of Zen Patriarch Dōgen

There’s nothing sticky-sweet in this spirited collection of poems exploring one grandmother’s relationship with her grandchildren as they dance and sing, climb hills, feast on mussels, or simply sit together side by side, with eyes closed, instructing each other. Willing to follow wherever the joyous curiosity and imagination of the child may lead, the poet also acknowledges the inner feelings of sadness and longing that well up at times beneath the surface— yet finds her way back to the present moment, knowing both joy and sorrow are holy.

The many adventures of this lively bunch will wake in the reader a palpable joy, while the haunting poem “Sacred Space” embodies an overarching sense of comfort and safety in the close love and light of family. This book is a gem—completely whole from start to finish in its wisdom, its humor, and the gift of openness—every word an embrace of the world as it is.

—Clyde Watson, author of Father Fox’s Pennyrhymes

It's This

A richly realized set of poems about the majesty of the present.

—Kirkus Reviews

I have been an admirer of Laura Foley's incisive, accessible, and delightful work for many years now. Her poems ease into your consciousness and can seem deceptively simple at first. But before you know it, you're seeing the so-called ordinary world in striking new ways, your own life suddenly "lit from inside." The poems in It's This are perhaps best sipped slowly, but I couldn't stop myself from reading them all in one sitting, hungry for the wisdom and joy Laura Foley offers so effortlessly to her readers.

—James Crews, editor of The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy

I love these quiet poems. In It's This, with her keen eye and generous heart, Laura Foley slips beneath the rhythms of daily life to explore what might be lost: our religion, our balance, our identities, our beloveds. With these losses, Foley weaves in bright epiphanies of what might be found: the dream of being, our place in the shifting world, the willingness to say Yes and Yes and Yes, and the sweetness of what's left behind. On every page, transformation.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author of Hush and Naked for Tea

Everything We Need: Poems from El Camino

In this beautiful collection of poetry, Laura shares her journey on the Camino de Santiago. Yet each poem brings its own mini journey, whether that be of a day, a meal or an experience. Running in parallel are the lives of the pilgrims on their quest, alongside the everyday lives of those who live and work along this spiritual path. I met Laura on the path and I smile at the many memories evoked by these poems. Enjoy your own journey through them.

—Heather Waring, author of How Walking Saved My Life

Why I Never Finished My Dissertation

Foley’s writing may appear sparse and reserved but it harbors a subtle power. The poet’s greatest strength is her acute sense of observation. She possesses the ability to thread sensuousness into the fabric of everyday life. . .This is a dazzling volume of poetry that delights in crisp imagery and tender recollections.

—Kirkus Reviews

The Glass Tree

In her third poetry collection, The Glass Tree, Laura Davies Foley achieves a faultless marriage of the personal and universal. Foley shares her grief over her husband’s death, her pleasure in her children, and the personal rewards of her poetry work in descriptions that are short and spare. Most are no longer than a page. What the pieces don’t give up by being so restrained is a richness that comes from the poet’s keen observational eye.

In “Slow Loss,” Foley recounts her husband’s declining health: “his mind weakens first, / letting go of facts, numbers // vanishing in the brain’s haze … // Not for years does the body follow, / gleefully sprouting tumors, cancer.” The language is crisp and succinct, and the brief poem of three stanzas is like a sped-up time-lapse video of moving toward life’s end. Anyone can relate, either through experience or anticipation.

Foley excels at creating relatable snapshots of her unique situation. In the narrative poem “Autism,” she writes about her daughter, who wakes in the middle of the night wailing. Foley, half asleep, soothes her with the lovely suggestion to “Get the / dog … Put your fingers through her fur … Sail on her back.” After a second interruption, Foley dives back into sleep, “down to where lily fronds sway and children, if there are / any, are easy to love.” Foley’s description of a parent’s unconditional love is crystal clear.

Some poems address Foley’s work as a hospital chaplain giving comfort to patients and families. She beautifully describes the sick and dying as “undersea creatures” attached to breathing tubes and beeping, whirring machines. Her language paints complicated pictures with a seemingly paradoxical simplicity.

Perhaps the most intriguing poem is “Homelessness Retreat,” in which the poet spends three nights sleeping on the streets with strangers and with no money or change of clothes, and not even a toothbrush. At three pages, this is a longer piece than Foley’s others, and it powerfully describes homelessness with bravery and compassion—not romanticizing the situation, but honoring it.

The Glass Tree was a finalist for the Philip Levine Prize in Poetry. Foley’s previous books, both published in 2007, are Syringa and Mapping the Fourth Dimension. Her work has been published in several journals, and she has received multiple awards and fellowships, including the Atlanta Review International Poetry Contest Grand Prize.

Interestingly, Foley has also worked with prisoners on the art of meditation. In her poem “In Concord Prison,” a prisoner, Kevin, notices a bud on a tree in winter, something only he can see from his vantage point of a “narrow window / too small to crawl from.” This piece gives ownership to Kevin of something that cannot be taken away from him, as his freedom has been. It gives him dignity.

That is what Foley’s poems do. They take ownership of feelings—anguish, adoration, frustration, joy, serenity—and give dignity to the dying, the impaired, the homeless, the imprisoned. With this collection, Foley shows that poetry really does have the power to set us free.

—Olivia Boler, Clarion Review

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 BondExecutive Producer, Care2 Healthy Living, Author of Home Enlightenment

Any person who has ever loved and lost and who continues to seek wholeness and peace needs Syringa on their bedside table.  Thank you for sharing your path and your heart with us.

—Sue Gillmor

Mapping the Fourth Dimension

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 Kannell, Kingdom Books