A Kind of Mercy by Sharon A. Foley

In A Kind of Mercy, Sharon A. Foley invites us to share her life in the convent of the Sisters of Mercy, its camaraderie, joys, sorrows, challenges, and worries. She also invites us into her own heart as she comes to “a swerve in the road” that brings her life as a nun to a close. As she says in one of these finely observed and exquisitely rendered poems: “Through this simple work/ I consecrate the day.” And through the simple work of these poems she consecrates her readers’ days as well. What a beautiful, quiet, deep, and illuminating book.

–Richard Hoffman, author of People Once Real

In poems as restrained and controlled as convent life, Sharon A. Foley traces her trajectory from postulant to nun as a member of the Sisters of Mercy and finally to her decision to leave the order. Her questions about her vocation are foreshadowed when, as a student teacher, she realizes that rather than form her students as the order desires “I don’t want to shape them, /I want them to bloom/into their own hues.”  Eloquently describing both moments of gaiety and devotion, Foley brings us with her on her journey to reconcile her spiritual and psychic needs.

–Kathleen Aguero, Author of World Happiness Index

Sharon A. Foley challenges us to look more closely at convent life, dispelling a concept of Sister of Mercy as object “waiting to be illuminated” by God, and revealing a glorious humanity compelled by the beauty of the world. A Kind of Mercy follows Foley’s decision to become a nun, convinced by the “velvet” life of her mentor: “I love her rapture…I love her kinetic mind.” But the questions come early and continue throughout the thirty years of her sisterhood. She asks about her early mentor, “What is it about her that ignites my thirst?” Of a friend leaving the convent she questions, “homesick or frailty?” In the exquisite “Once a Month Meditation on Death” Foley attempts to “picture myself in a pine coffin,” meant to inspire a “dispassionate” detachment from bodily death, but knowing it is “running/from my father’s impending death.” The struggle of sisterhood is to replace the needs of the flesh with bending to God’s direction, but pink bras, sexual attractions, curled eyelashes, Bach, Shakespeare, and strawberries intrude.   Foley’s work is an honest and rare glimpse of the poet striving for the tender mercy we should allow humanity, that of the religious sisters and that of those beyond the order.

–Carol Hobbs, author of New-found-land