Ladies and gentlemen of Facebook, please join me in congratulating Fox Frazier-Foley on winning a Poetry Book Prize from Bright Hill Press in sunny upstate NY! Also take a min to read what the judge had to say about her book below, crazy high praise! Fox Frazier-Foley casts a spell in her stunning first book of poetry, The Hydromantic Histories. Divining both broken music and memorable speech from the waters of her grief and desire, her initiation into Haitian Vodou, and her remarkably innovative language, Frazier-Foley writes with a sacerdotal eloquence that arcs luminously, hauntingly, between the conceits of her Vodou and Christian hagiography and her gripping witness to scenes of loss and abuse. Frazier-Foley has been hurt into a poetry in which her “harmonies weave after/ mourn/ identify/ find the elusive thicket in which the every-/ where of this/ ceases.” Although one hears echoes of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Sylvia Plath in her poems, they are all hers, devotional and profane, elaborate and plain, scattered and linear, erotic and prayerful, fleeting, and permanent. The Hydromantic Histories is a paradoxical wilderness comprised of duende and chaos within the confines of masterful artifice. “The language of loss is ultimately elusive,” repeats the voice between the lines of these poems. This awareness instills Fox Frazier-Foley with the gift bestowed to strong poets, namely the talent to renew and shape language with an abandon that is also exquisitely crafted. I welcome The Hydromantic Histories as a rare first book with the lyrical efficacy and poetic vision to, as Ralph Waldo Emerson commented about the vatic role of poetry in general in his essay “The American Scholar,” “revive and lead in a new age.”
Posted on: Sat, 18 Oct 2014 18:03:57 +0000
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