Selected Poems of Thomas Albert Fox
Insistence
1 Transitory Good Warmth
2 Waves
3 Friend
4 Spring
5 Wide eyes
6 Rebecca Fountain
7 At the back
8 Hebrides
9 Image
10 Sitting Fat
11 Preying
12 Two & two
13 Seat of Power
14 Woodmill
15 Casevac Cyprus
16 Jasmin
17 Cherry Tree
18 Memory
19 Boy With Guitar
20 Bell
21 For one who is truly beautiful
22 Apart from me
23 Old Man
24 On James going to St Thomas More's
25 Parting
26 Pain
27 Inprint
28 Katie Sunflower
29 Drink
30 Sea moon
31 Ink
32 Little Thing
33 Best
34 Dark Pearl
35 Forget fully
36 I sing and this is heard
37 Long Winter
38 snow Shadow
39 Looking I
40 Invading dream
41 My Colleagues and I,
42 Foggy
43 Just the same
44 Serendipity
45 Bright and dim in the sun
46 Cold wind
47 Bare Brain Bone
48 Woman is foolish
49 Quarks
50 Time Flys
51 Looking Light
52 Bask and live a day
53 Dark hours
54 Going on
55 To Handa Island
56 Edwards Terrence Allen 1942-
57 Kylesku Song
58 Nessie
59 Road to Hope Song
60 High Road Song
61 Sand Goddess Song
62 Water Can Swim
63 no peeping
64 March Hare
65 My House
66 The Front
67 Chrysalised
68 A Light at Night
69 Unforseen
70 Babes in the WoodNOTES
"Insistence", so far, has seventy poems each observing the disguises of one and the same event whose guises of being variously otherwise than themselves deceive Fox not (he claims). Each poem observes that which insists on being neither here nor there, but cannot be avoided, cannot be overlooked, is certain of itself though it has no place, subsisting only at points of dis-location, whereat there is appearance shrouded by reality. Here disaffection is misplaced, confusing truth with repetition, as if truth once seen could ever bear repeating.
The volume "Insistence" can be likened to a crowd of lonely poems gathered in a cloud above the Wye Valley in England, the very image of sentimentality overcoming the transience, as it were that such cloud threatens snow in a blaze of sun. The thought of snow among the brightness of sun and the English hedgerow in May is culpable of blinding with light the vision of these poems. Each poem is a brilliant stump, a memory groping and gripping upon itself, an amputee feeling for the ends of lost life, as if they are words touching on sense or tickling fancies hard to imagine. Such words, groping and gripping insistently, hold Fox (and me) here on earth, stuck to her surface, a fallen apple rotting for want of consumption, though serving universal illustration of a mundane grip that seriously binds us insisting on the gravity of our position, here ground in the earthiness of our lives and the grind of moving among our days and our nights. In truth, the poems in "Insistence" wander lonely as a crowd, beyond the ineluctable lyricism of the communique from the poet (that popular person incomprehensibly beyond you, who knows what you should be feeling, hmm?).
Fox chose Rebecca Fountain for display on the web to illustrate how image and emotion and tradition can be joined by a process of de-fragmentation, to the make Old World forms recognisable. The central biblical image combines with the present as if lost, and found articulated with water and stone. However, the poem is primarily a lyric about Fox leaving his daughter Rebecca behind at the break up of his first marriage.
BACK to Library