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.

Genres: Poetry

107 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 11, 2019

Reviews

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 3 out of 5]

As unfamiliar with this poet as I was, some of the early poems in this collection made me think she might be a first-nations poet, as her works seem to honor women from those traditions and also to grapple with her country (Canada in this case) and its ongoing mistreatment, but then the tone shifted and I started to wonder. Then it's like the perspective goes global, and it felt strange until I read more about the poet, who has lived all over the world. That either provides some universal themes or makes the collection a bit disjointed.

The entire last section seems to be a reckoning with cancer and mortality, and included familiar feelings. Do these poems have an affinity with the themes of the rest of the collection? I'm not sure.

I gained access to this collection via Edelweiss. It came out July 11, 2019.

[Robert Hamberger · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 'Adamantine' Naomi Foyle pushes the boundaries of her poems to explore how fiercely the personal is political and vice versa, to honour a range of extraordinary women, and (with tenderness, honesty and lyricism) to examine her won experience of cancer. She digs into her complex relationship with Canada, uncovering commitment and ambivalence with admirable courage, nudging her poems into crevices of feeling and questions, allowing the various colours of her history to blend and contrast. She travels past Canada to Northern Ireland, the Dead Sea and Grenfell Tower and sings sorrowful, passionate hymns of praise.
The final third of 'Adamantine' is comprised of Foyle's searching sequence 'The Cancer Breakthrough'. This showcases the breadth of Foyle's poetic skills: her ability to balance ambiguity - fear and uncertainty, moving towards tentative celebration - with remarkable candour, making her images earn their keep as she confronts and probes her tumour, the changes in her body: 'trespasser acorn/sprouting in flesh -'
There's a powerful restlessness of form and subject in 'Adamantine', the urgency of a varied voice that won't be satisfied with easy answers:
'I am not brave.
All I have done is submit
to the will of the seasons, embrace

an untranslatable change.'