‘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

If they haven’t done so already, some judging committee somewhere should shortlist [this collection] for a significant prize. Impressively varied and agile in form, international in scope, Salt & Snow is as emotionally rich as it is politically alert, drawing strength from its predominant genre, the elegy. The “in memorium” poems lament both individuals known privately to the poet, and public “names” including author and art critic John Berger, poet Lee Harwood and US police murder victim George Floyd. There is no significant difference in Foyle’s approach: what particularly distinguishes all the elegies is the depth of imaginative empathy brought to bear on the various lives and deaths. ~ Carol Rumens (The Guardian)

[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

Naomi Foyle’s new collection Salt & Snow (Waterloo Press, 2025) is formed entirely of elegies in a dazzling variety of forms. Certainly no one could accuse her of neglecting the individuality of the dedicatee or their culture. These poems engage with the everyday, with political movements, nuanced relationships and the struggle to create, often linking contradictory emotions through rhymes, half-rhymes and impressively resonating last lines . . . Foyle anchors the dead to the daily evidences of love without sentimentalising ways of surviving our cruel times. The whole collection is a living, warm and powerful engagement with elegy and with people, in all their fascinations, obsessions and sufferings.  ~ Stephanie Norgate

What stands out for me throughout this collection is the sheer beauty of expression and the deep underlying humanity that is characteristic of Foyle’s work. Highly recommended. ~ Rennie Halstead (London Grip)

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.