Tilly Foulkes is a young poet from a remote outpost of Wales. She commits her thoughts on herself and the world around her to paper with a shattering detached acuity.
Foulkes’ most recent work, disorder, is an autobiographical look at the resolve to overcome mental health difficulties. Rather than employing the confessional style classic in the form of mental health poetry, Foulkes is here assertive, rebellious.
Foulkes’ verse has a kick, a self-conscious revolt. She “died when she was thirteen”, for the “rusty torn shell” of emaciation and self-abnegation. She is “freezing” under her downy lanugo, despite her place “in Hell”. This is a hell of her own design, she declares. She “earned” it. She was the architect of her own brutalist body. She only gives up her place presiding over an intrapersonal empire of bones because of inability to continue: she found herself “kicked out” by the headspace that allowed for it. She has been locked out of the palace that was her leprous etiolation.
Foulkes realizes in the final lines of the piece that she must relinquish her desire to return to the ivory tower in order to come once more to life. Like a plant which has for too long gone without nourishment, she releases herself to return to the ground and to grow. As the poem ends, there comes an pounding iambic, gunfire-like manifesto, a statement of psychological ideology, a statement of intent to prevail. And I’m sure that Tilly Foulkes will prevail, both as a living person and as a poet. She deserves to be recognized for her uncommon mastery of the difficult medium that is poetry.
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