Praise and Poems

Subtle and wild, passionate and wise, Naomi Foyle’s second collection will bring her yet more admirers. Whether she is writing of the indigenos of Mexico or the state terrorism Israel practices on the people of Gaza: whether she writes of love and its mazes and despairs; the mishaps of a gangly footballer; or the free spirits of her home town Brighton, Naomi Foyle shoots both from the heart and the head. A vivid, pacey raconteur, with a sharp eye for satire, unusually, she shines at the longer narrative poem, burnishing a minor crisis into something wondrous, always with a relish for the pleasures of life whether serious or absurd. Warmth, curiosity, human sympathy are the base notes of a poetry commanding dramatically different themes and settings, and a variety of forms.
Judith Kazantzis

Naomi Foyle’s brilliantly detailed, sensually absorbed, light-saturated mix of personal findings and their extension into the political, make her poetry my sort of poetry. Naomi is her own subject, whether swimming in a scarlet two-piece at Land’s End, sitting in a restaurant window, arriving at Brenda and Isabelle’s object-littered flat, or acutely noting how ‘The sound your swollen finger makes/ plucking at the mouth/of the soda water bottle/gives my cheekbones definition.’ Naomi Foyle injects concentrated visual imagery into re-casting a world in which ‘men are sharp as lemons; women sting like limes.’ I go to her poems to see things shine clear as the light in a diamond.
Jeremy Reed