Kate Foley

Kate Foley is a widely published, prize-winning poet who has read in many London, other UK and European locations. Her first collection, Soft Engineering was short listed for best first collection at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival.

Kate, born in London before WW2, now lives in both Amsterdam and Suffolk, where she writes, performs and leads workshops and where, when possible, she likes to work with other poets and artists of any other discipline. Her working life as a nurse, midwife, teacher and archaeological conservator meant that she didn’t consider being published until she retired from her last day job as Head of  English Heritage’s Ancient Monuments Laboratory. Her 9th collection, Electric Psalms:New and Selected Poems was published by Shoestring Press, 2016, and her 10th collection, A Gift of Rivers, from Arachne Press came out in 2018.

Kate is currently President of Suffolk Poetry Society.

PUBLICATIONS & COMMENTS

Soft Engineering Only Women Press, 1994,U A Fanthorpe‘…the heart speaks with patient accuracy…of all kinds of love in which attention and feeling are finely tuned…’

A Year Without Apricots, Blackwater Press, 1999 UA. Fanthorpe. ‘…a brilliant touch with imagery, a light exact way with words, and a whole basketful of unexpected perspectives…a Hughes- like visual accuracy…’

Laughter from the Hive Shoestring Press, 2004 Dilys Wood ‘…breathtakingly original….’  UA Fanthorpe ‘…a rare thing, a poet with the candid Dutch, exact gaze…the gift of precise mystery…’

The Silver Rembrandt Shoestring Press, 2008 Timothy Hyman, painter and critic: ‘…with all the material a novelist might engage with, yet shaped with the wrought intensity and resource of poetic language’  Penelope Shuttle:‘…Foley uses a remarkable exactness and fluidity of language…to depict…the hard work of firstly claiming the self then mending the self.’

One Window North Shoestring Press, 2012 Dilys Wood, ‘So many poems here combine intimacy with forcefulness…humour with deep seriousness…conveying the impression that each small event is bound in a greater whole…’

A Fox Assisted Cure (pamphlet) Shoestring Press 2012 Rachel Playforth, ‘…a wonderful narrative poem…brilliant characterisation…’

Night and Other Animals (pamphlet) Green Lantern Press, 2002 Catherine Byron, ‘…words a burnt pokerwork on the skin…’

DAPHNE SAID
i.m Daphne Rock :while listening to  Mahler’s Resurrection symphony

‘ I don’t want to leave
this beautiful world’ Daphne said.
But she did.

I think of her,
dignified, un-reconciled,
as the trumpets thread

together, like the blue
tributaries on the back
of an old hand

and the cardiac arrhythmia
of the music pulses
towards

that last and only
resurrection,
the sound of a human voice.

Copyright © 2017 Kate Foley

First published in Artemis Poetry 2017