Poetry review – TRY TO FIND ME: Sue Wallace-Shaddad discovers that Tessa Foley’s poetry takes her to unfamiliar places
Try to Find Me
Tessa Foley
Live Canon
ISBN 978-1-909703-74-2
76pp £12
Try to Find Me is Tessa Foley’s third collection published by Live Canon. It gave me a feeling of stepping into another world which Foley conjures up through startling imagery and often street-wise language. There is an element of the surreal in the way Foley pushes boundaries.
The collection as a whole explores the voice of girls and women. In the first poem “Like a Powerful Man”, the narrator is ‘a chieftainess, warlady’. Adolescence features in several poems. In “Your Call”, Foley writes of girls in ‘denim-white shirts pulled/ Snap! across arses’. The poem title “If You’re not Scared” is also used as a refrain at the end of each seven-line stanza. The poem imagines possible scenarios in each stanza but then reality bites in the last one:
[…] it’s you
and me and I hiding out in Sunnyside,
where sunlight never coughed on any of us twice,
The transformation into a housewife of a young woman who used to drink is captured in “Dry Missus” when ‘sober days are/ baked potato slow’. The domestic grind is suggested effectively in the lines:
Gone is lurking rough behind the skip, and now
she asks ‘How far is the nearest tip?’
Repetition is one of the techniques Foley uses in several poems. In “Bride” the phrase ‘sooner or later’ appears five times, followed by one instance of ‘sooner’. This implies inevitability. The poem ends ‘you’ll throw yourself onto your brittle bouquet’. Foley also draws on well-known sayings such as ‘each hour I picked a peck of dusty thrills’ in “Like a Powerful Man”. This echoes the alliterative tongue-twister ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper’. In “The Velvet Men”, ‘incy wincing little stars’ alludes to the children’s nursery rhyme “Incy Wincy Spider”.
Good examples of Foley’s inventive use of voice and language can also be found in the poem “The Place to Be”. The narrator tells of making a regular visit on a Thursday to a ‘cellar music hall’ which has ‘the smackle thump dance/ that can’t be topped’ and where ‘the whitewashed beams/ hurt-snog my bonce […]’. Party days are also evoked in the poem “Shorty”, written as an eighteen-line single stanza. There is a play on the words ‘party’ and ‘part’ throughout the poem e.g. ‘party now in part to be with them’. Those identified as ‘them’ ‘shuffled cards as magic/ fags dangled from their smirks at dusk’.
One of the cast of characters in this collection is an old woman who is ‘haphanded’ with an ‘ottering grasp’ and appears in “The Same Space”. Middle-age is considered in “From One who would not be Forty”. The narrator issues eight stanzas of advice, often starting with the word ‘Don’t’ as in
Don’t you dance – your knees just don’t work
and for Christ’s sake don’t twerk,
you look like a fat deckchair,
However, the poem then has an ‘Epilogue’ in which the narrator states ‘those were all lies I just told you’, followed by a ‘Correction’ which ends ‘Just do what you like.’ There is both empathy and rejection in this poem. It could be a poem where the poet is talking to herself.
A street is personified at the end of “I Can’t Talk Now (not to my neighbours)”. Each stanza describes aspects of living in the street, ‘where hermit crabs/ crawl out of the cupboards’ but then the street takes over in the four final stanzas, it
Screwed us up then shook us up and
Left both you and me with nothing but an empty wound,
The poem “Why is it Only when she’s Smoking?” considers the lure of a woman ‘only hot with that red hot tip’. The narrator comments ‘Imagine yet just kissing that ashtray pout’. To my mind, Foley does not judge when writing about these characters but lays bare very different experiences.
Descriptions of men are equally inventive. In “Women Love Power” a man is described as ‘a sugar mouse boy’ who ‘bleeds into his suit and Surrey-chewed lilt’. The powerplay going on between man and woman is deftly captured with a somewhat ironic ending. The subject of the poem “Your Ghost” is a ghost which is ‘small, bubble-eyed and endlessly walking’.
“We Walk”, a longer poem with fifteen stanzas, is a call to sisterhood:
There are those who will refuse
to stand among the weeping trees
and allow a woman
to exist.
The poem ends ‘We walk together/ when we walk alone’. “A Woman takes off her Shirt”, a poem in which the word ‘floats’ runs diagonally across the middle, seems to be about freedom: a woman can ‘war rain to the thunderclouds’; freedom is symbolised by the shirt which ‘rotor blades over her head’:
And millions of hearts
under millions of breasts
strike up the band and play marches,
A thread running through the collection is that women should be valued. “Transmission” is also a call to arms: ‘Can you hear me, Young Women?/ I am the sentry of this century’. The poem ends
be my daughters, my wake,
tell the crowd, tell the earth,
You are worth the transmission.
This is a collection that one needs to read several times in order to absorb the dense richness of descriptions and language; doing so repays the effort. The poems have ‘edge’, often portraying a rough side of life. I would say that Foley has a unique voice; the reader should go with the flow and enjoy the ride.
Jul 3 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Tessa Foley
Poetry review – TRY TO FIND ME: Sue Wallace-Shaddad discovers that Tessa Foley’s poetry takes her to unfamiliar places
Try to Find Me is Tessa Foley’s third collection published by Live Canon. It gave me a feeling of stepping into another world which Foley conjures up through startling imagery and often street-wise language. There is an element of the surreal in the way Foley pushes boundaries.
The collection as a whole explores the voice of girls and women. In the first poem “Like a Powerful Man”, the narrator is ‘a chieftainess, warlady’. Adolescence features in several poems. In “Your Call”, Foley writes of girls in ‘denim-white shirts pulled/ Snap! across arses’. The poem title “If You’re not Scared” is also used as a refrain at the end of each seven-line stanza. The poem imagines possible scenarios in each stanza but then reality bites in the last one:
The transformation into a housewife of a young woman who used to drink is captured in “Dry Missus” when ‘sober days are/ baked potato slow’. The domestic grind is suggested effectively in the lines:
Repetition is one of the techniques Foley uses in several poems. In “Bride” the phrase ‘sooner or later’ appears five times, followed by one instance of ‘sooner’. This implies inevitability. The poem ends ‘you’ll throw yourself onto your brittle bouquet’. Foley also draws on well-known sayings such as ‘each hour I picked a peck of dusty thrills’ in “Like a Powerful Man”. This echoes the alliterative tongue-twister ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper’. In “The Velvet Men”, ‘incy wincing little stars’ alludes to the children’s nursery rhyme “Incy Wincy Spider”.
Good examples of Foley’s inventive use of voice and language can also be found in the poem “The Place to Be”. The narrator tells of making a regular visit on a Thursday to a ‘cellar music hall’ which has ‘the smackle thump dance/ that can’t be topped’ and where ‘the whitewashed beams/ hurt-snog my bonce […]’. Party days are also evoked in the poem “Shorty”, written as an eighteen-line single stanza. There is a play on the words ‘party’ and ‘part’ throughout the poem e.g. ‘party now in part to be with them’. Those identified as ‘them’ ‘shuffled cards as magic/ fags dangled from their smirks at dusk’.
One of the cast of characters in this collection is an old woman who is ‘haphanded’ with an ‘ottering grasp’ and appears in “The Same Space”. Middle-age is considered in “From One who would not be Forty”. The narrator issues eight stanzas of advice, often starting with the word ‘Don’t’ as in
However, the poem then has an ‘Epilogue’ in which the narrator states ‘those were all lies I just told you’, followed by a ‘Correction’ which ends ‘Just do what you like.’ There is both empathy and rejection in this poem. It could be a poem where the poet is talking to herself.
A street is personified at the end of “I Can’t Talk Now (not to my neighbours)”. Each stanza describes aspects of living in the street, ‘where hermit crabs/ crawl out of the cupboards’ but then the street takes over in the four final stanzas, it
The poem “Why is it Only when she’s Smoking?” considers the lure of a woman ‘only hot with that red hot tip’. The narrator comments ‘Imagine yet just kissing that ashtray pout’. To my mind, Foley does not judge when writing about these characters but lays bare very different experiences.
Descriptions of men are equally inventive. In “Women Love Power” a man is described as ‘a sugar mouse boy’ who ‘bleeds into his suit and Surrey-chewed lilt’. The powerplay going on between man and woman is deftly captured with a somewhat ironic ending. The subject of the poem “Your Ghost” is a ghost which is ‘small, bubble-eyed and endlessly walking’.
“We Walk”, a longer poem with fifteen stanzas, is a call to sisterhood:
The poem ends ‘We walk together/ when we walk alone’. “A Woman takes off her Shirt”, a poem in which the word ‘floats’ runs diagonally across the middle, seems to be about freedom: a woman can ‘war rain to the thunderclouds’; freedom is symbolised by the shirt which ‘rotor blades over her head’:
A thread running through the collection is that women should be valued. “Transmission” is also a call to arms: ‘Can you hear me, Young Women?/ I am the sentry of this century’. The poem ends
This is a collection that one needs to read several times in order to absorb the dense richness of descriptions and language; doing so repays the effort. The poems have ‘edge’, often portraying a rough side of life. I would say that Foley has a unique voice; the reader should go with the flow and enjoy the ride.