It’s This contemplates relationships, identity, love, loss, and radical transformation, finding acceptance, joy, and growing peace, as the speaker practices meditation, and falls more deeply in love with her wife.
Employing spare, musical language and humor, and suffused with light, these vivid poems flash back to the speaker’s past, as they practice empathy and compassion in the present – for self and others, across political aisles, and species. Learning to accept mortality in losing loved ones and chaplaining hospice patients, she increasingly appreciates what presence has to teach, in the woods of nature and relationships: everything we seek is already in us, in each shining moment we allow ourselves to focus wholly on everything present, the hologram of this, which is the universe, “this field of snow, where I sit alone/on a hilltop, until I think of nothing, / but light – light on snow, light/prisming ice, light on light, on light.”
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
Laura Foley’s It’s This is rich with thoughtful, moving poems. With a delicate touch, she evokes her Vermont home, her beloved wife and grandchildren, and above all, expresses an acute and tender empathy with animals, insects, all of nature. These are quiet, profound, and healing poems.
Marge Piercy, author of On the Way Out, Turn Off the Light
Laura Foley
has won numerous awards, and national recognition-her poems read frequently on The Writer’s Almanac; appearing in American Life in Poetry, Alaska Quarterly Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Poetry Society London, Crannog Magazine and many others, and included in anthologies such as: Poetry of Presence, How to Love the World, and Roads Taken. Many of her poems have been turned into songs and performed in venues around the country, including Carnegie Hall and the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Laura lives with her wife, Clara Gimenez, and their two romping canines, among the hills of Vermont.