‘Whose bodies are blanketed? Whose bodies blanked out?’ asks Naomi Foyle’s searching fourth collection, Salt & Snow. Lamenting personal and collective loss, this triptych of elegies contains tributes to departed family members, friends and writers including John Berger, Judith Kazantzis, Niall McDevitt and Gwendolyn Leick; and pays homage to victims of political violence from George Floyd to civilians caught up or killed in the full scale invasion of Ukraine, the Hamas war crimes of Oct 7th and Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Concluding with a mythopoetic sonnet crown circling themes of eco-apocalypse and regeneration, Salt & Snow is a finely interwoven meditation on grief, witness, whiteness and climate crisis.

Cover image ‘In Salt’ by John Luke Chapman / @darklingeye

Purchase Salt & Snow at your local bookshop or online from Waterloo Press.

Praise for Salt & Snow

[Salt & Snow] has healed my grieving heart . . . These poems made me weep and also uplifted me because they reminded me that poetry can find a language when we thought we had no words. I am reminded of John Berger who tells us how “poems cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by easy reassurance but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been.” This book has taken me by the hand and walked me amongst my own wounded places touching on my personal losses and giving me the hope that the thousands of deaths increasing each day in Palestine will not be forgotten. ~ Seni Seneviratne

Naomi Foyle’s passionate poems explore how various facets of ‘I’ respond and change under the influence of ‘you’ – in friendship, history, politics, family and elegy. Foyle is fascinated by relationships, foregrounding other people and their dynamic transience. Links are made, and run the risk of being broken by death, although Foyle resists the grief by her rich celebration of a gallery of portraits, the enduring spark between two people. Salt & Snow is a shapeshifting, life-affirming collection, rejoicing in ‘octopuses/pretending to be seaweed’, affinity and difference. ~ Robert Hamberger

‘Lockdown, Week Ten’, is hard-hitting, heartbreaking and painful, yet also an affirmation of people of colour, and a positive engagement in the discourses around racial injustice. Thank you, Naomi Foyle. ~ Catherine Okoronkwo

Ways of Seeing Trees

i.m. John Berger

The tongue
is the spine’s first leaf
you wrote

and if that’s true –

which it must be
for whenever I repeat your words
to myself
I grow taller
taste sap –

then grief
that sour clench
in my stomach
at the news
of your stilled voice

is a burl in my torso
a barked knot
of injured grain
that warps the birthing ring
of this new year

but worked
by careful hand
may convert a canker
into re-enchanted Earth

and left to age
give courage girth.