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**
Review comments on The
Silver Rembrandt
** Kate Foley was born in London in 1938 and had a varied career as nurse, midwife and teacher before she settled down to a long spell in archaeological science and conservation. She is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and was awarded an honorary doctorate by De Montfort University for her work in conservation education. Since 1997 she has lived in Amsterdam where she is a member of the writers’ group Wordsinhere and is one of the editorial team for its international magazine, Versal. Over the last two years she has been an adjudicator for the David Reid Translation prize for poetry translated from Dutch to English. She regularly enjoys giving workshops in Amsterdam, Utrecht and in the UK. Her first collection, Soft Engineering, was published by Onlywomen Press 1994 and was short-listed for the Aldeburgh Festival best first collection prize. Second and third full collections were A Year Without Apricots, Blackwater Press, 1999 (now available from John Lucas of Shoestring Press), and Laughter from the Hive, Shoestring Press, 2004 but in September 2002 a chapbook, Night and Other Animals, consisting of two long poems was published by the Green Lantern Press. Her latest collection, The Silver Rembrandt, (Shoestring, 2008), includes a poem-novella, which tells the story, framed amongst poems about Rembrandt's paintings, of Lily - provincial, post-war, working class - as she grows... "Could I be a nartist?", she asks her gran, after seeing her teacher's postcard from Amsterdam depicting Old Woman Reading. (see review comments) She has published in a wide variety of magazines. Poems of hers are also to be found in several anthologies, including : Not for the Academy, Onlywomen Press; If Girls Could Boast Oskar’s Press; The Red Candle Treasury, Red Candle Press; Love Shook my Senses, The Women’s Press; Parents, Enitharmon; Making Worlds, Headlands Press; Poetry to Heal Your Blues, MQP Publications and forthcoming, Images of Women, Arrowhead Press in association with Second Light. She has won a number of prizes, has read in most of the major poetry venues in London and Amsterdam, loves working with artists from other media and is delighted to be at last leading a life where there is a bit more time for the sharing of poetry. The Silver Rembrandt review comments: The sequence is formidable both for its narrative clarity, equal to Jackie Kay’s, and its intense release into moments of stilled lyric that offers us the opportunity to find what, in her first sexual experience, Lily has
begun to know Finding naked is the book’s work, shaped as specifically female and working class, as it looks for a place in contemporary aesthetic culture that defies John Berger’s astute observation that men in Western art are naked, women nude. What Rembrandt offers Lily is not just – or not so much – the inspiration to pursue her own art, which she comes to realise is mediocre, but what she encounters first in his work, when her teacher sends the class a postcard of ‘Old Woman Reading’. ‘It isn’t her face’ the description begins, ending: ‘what counts / is the glowing gospel of her hand.’ Sophie
Mayer, Chroma ‘...Foley uses a remarkable exactness and yet fluidity of language to depict Lily, whose story is... of the hard work of firstly claiming the self, and then mending the self. ... Descriptions of twelve Rembrandts are placed as bridge passages throughout the poem-novella, shaping and echoing Lily's story with beautifully judged acuracy... Now I can't think of a poetic form more difficult to master than the novel or novella in verse! Yet here it is, ingeniously and scrupulously acheived. A further fourteen short poems complete this collection, each reflecting in its own individual way a constand and important theme in Foley's work, which is to investigate "the sort of love" which is "tough as a Kevlar vest.’ Penelope
Shuttle, ARTEMISpoetry,
Issue 1, Nov 08
‘an elliptical novel - a kind of bildungsroman which includes all the material a novelist might engage with, yet shaped with the wrought intensity and resource of poetic language.’ Timothy Hyman, artist & commentator General review comments: ‘..a poet who shows us how often we..have the experience but miss the meaning…poems alive with sensuous detail..these epiphanies are earthed’ Critical Survey
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"Laughter "Soft
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