Saved to Cloud Kate Foley
Poetry February 2023
198x129mm 60pp
Print 978-1-913665-76-0 £9.99
eBook 978-1-913665-77-7 £4.00
The algorithm
of my own life, faded
and spidery,
is written,
not keyed in.
From bombsites used as childhood playgrounds to lockdown FaceTime calls, Kate Foley looks back on almost nine decades of life – a life characterised by curiosity, resistance and a strong connection with the natural world.
Appreciation and concern for the planet runs through this frank and moving collection, which muses on the notions of faith and belief, ultimately rejecting both Whitehall politics and traditional religion as inadequate to deal with environmental crisis.
Simultaneously nostalgic and highly concerned with the future, Kate Foley’s candid reminiscence and simple use of language draw us softly into consideration of life’s big questions: What’s it all for? How will we be remembered?
Will it build again, our earth?
Kate Foley’s Saved to Cloud is alive with questioning. ‘What’s it all for?’ she reports her father asking, and examines, in poems that are, at the same time, both simple and complex, what we can, and can’t ever, know. From stone age to Apocalypse, language as messages we’re not equipped to hear to love being the only language we need to learn, from childhood reminiscences to the puzzlement of old age, from just being alive to technology, politics, war and climate change – nothing escapes her sharp, wise eye and mind. Foley’s poetry, as always, is deeply thoughtful and, to steal words of her own, far ‘more than words’.
Anne Stewart, ArtemisPoetry
Kate Foley’s poems are wide-ranging, contemporary in tone, and display a clarity and freshness of voice, in questioning this bric-a-brac of days where we live.
In tightly-knit, often ironic poems, she gives an original twist to many aspects of our human situation and encourages us to see the possibilities in the singleness of a leaf or in the atom, or In the joy of birds or a walk in the park.
These are poems that reflect in many ways the diverse wonders of the universe and all its creatures:
How can a leaf
dancing in the wake of a gull
write
the soul’s weather
so we learn
to read?
Katherine Gallagher
