Adamantine

Naomi Foyle

• Publisher: Pighog
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781906309473
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Women in Poetry
• Index: Literature

In Adamantine, award-winning poet Naomi Foyle demonstrates again her dazzling formal range, and broadens her stubborn commitment to the truths of female experience. Deploying visual poetry, free verse, sonnets, the ballad and spoken word rhythms, the book's opening sequence honours the achievements of outstanding women from Mohawk writer and performer Tekahionwake and Canadian painter Emily Carr to Anglo-Irish revolutionaries Eva Gore-Booth and Constance Markievicz; and eulogises unsung heroines including the prematurely deceased writer Emily Givner, the mothers and orators of West Belfast, and Pamela Jean George, a murdered young Aboriginal woman from Foyle's home province of Saskatchewan. Developing Foyle's concern with the Middle East, so evident in her acclaimed second collection The World Cup, from troubled reflections on political violence spring tributes to Palestinian and Israeli prisoners of conscience – and to Arabic poetry. Elsewhere, a vividly imagined conversation between Old Testament wives imbues the collection with a deeper historical resonance, while personal pilgrimages lead the reader from chanteuse Nico's graveyard in Berlin to the mass crematorium of Grenfell Tower. In its riveting combination of theatrical flair and emotional vulnerability, the book's final sequence, The Cancer Breakthrough, recalls the imagistic pyrotechnics of Foyle's PBS Recommended debut collection The Night Pavilion, but also pays homage, not just to the poet's resilience and relentless creativity, but the power of loving community.

ADAMANTINE

Two Emilys

after Emily Carr
i.m. Emily Givner

Odoodem poles.
She stared at them so long
that everything—forest, ocean, rain—
carved pathways to the
infinite kinship she craved.

Her sky

was a scraped oyster shell,
pearly shale rubbed raw.
Her trees swirl and bulge,
emerald, jade and lime
meringues she beat
until her arms were stiff,
folding in the dazzle
of the light beyond
the clouds.
But though

her paintings exude

the scent of cedar and sea,
capture the tilt of totems
from Cumshewa
to Gitanyow,
they cannot show you
the true height or shapes
of those poles,
nor the long shadows
of their meaning
in languages broken
like salamander bones.

Emily—

my fierce high school friend,
Empress of impossible questions . . .
how fear twitched like a fish in my belly
when you’d swivel round in class to hiss:
“Would you go back in time and kill Hitler?”
or, when I was still a shy virgin,
“So, Ni. Would you have sex
with a black man?”

I backtracked and stalled.
You went hunting for answers—
not, like me, at university.
I glimpsed you before I left town,
sauntering down Albert St in a mini-skirt,
hand-in-hand with your Cree boyfriend,
sunlight licking the back of your legs,
a feather caressing your hair.

Small town girls with big dreams,
our paths should have criss-crossed later
in Toronto, Seoul, the wine-fuelled reunions
of prodigal daughters and journeying writers—
but you secretly suffered from allergies,
died without warning on a hot day in Halifax,
leaving so many conversations unfinished.

Emily, your spirit burned brighter
than a Saskatchewan summer;
your small face still shines
like the moon in my waters.

Klee Wyck,

‘the laughing one’,

the Nuu-chah-nulth

named her,

offering Emily,

her dancing brushes,

elated paint,

a place

beneath the cedar ribs

of their ancestral longhouse,

a privileged spirit witness

to its blowhole of forbidden tradition:

the Pacific Northwest Coast’s

ceremonial gift-giving feast.

But how can a white artist

circling around

that defiant exchange

of oolichan, canoes,

whale oil and sta-bigs,

ornamental coppers, sealskins

and Hudson Bay blankets,

not steal

away with the

power of her hosts?

Gnawed at by critics,

Carr’s monumental status

teeters and sways

on a point of

heart

to

heart

contact

with the First People

of a country that banned the ‘uncivilized’ potlatch from 1884 to 1951.

Sticky
as sap,
a poem
drips
down
the page.
Only
voiced
can it
soar
into
air.

Emily
wrote stories,
won a summer prize
for ‘Canadian Mint’,
her slyly spooky tale
of enterprising
Eddie,
sittin’ out all day
on Bloor Street,
building pillars
from pennies . . .

an arcane way
to zigzag time
I researched
on the empty
shelves
of my first flat
in England,
but not a sight
I’d ever seen
on sidewalks—

until that August
morning, when,
back in Canada
at last, running
late to meet
Emily’s parents
for the first time
since her death,

I thundered past
a woman kneeling
by a bus stop,
cracking open
rolls of coins,
a spilling
wealth
of pennies

to join the
copper forest
growing
on the concrete
that for a silver
moment
disappeared
beneath
my flying
feet

Zunoqua—
capricious spirit,
snatcher of children,
bestower of wealth—
your predatory breasts
thrust like cougars
through a forest
few European women
penetrate alone.
In the stillness
of a long-deserted
Gwat’sinux village,
Carr, at last, perceived you
as benign. And though
that towering carving
was in fact a male
ancestor of the Chief,
as Emily spread the dark
paint on her canvas
a dawn of feral cats,
eyes glinting
like gold planets,
came prowling
through the
undergrowth
to hiss she was
not entirely
wrong.

reQuesting

i.m. Pamela Jean George

How to return home
to a land I wasn’t born in
a land my people took
from a people who know
that no-one owns the Earth
How to return
that land?

How to respond
to beadwork moccasins,
moo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Adamantine
• The Cancer Breakthrough
• Notes
• Back Cover