Fiona Sampson was first a concert violinist, then studied at the Universities of Oxford, where she won the Newdigate Prize, and Nijmegen, where she received a PhD in the philosophy of language. This research arose from her pioneering residencies in health care. She has published seventeen books, including Rough Music (short-listed for the Forward Prize and T.S. Eliot Prize 2010) and A Century of Poetry Review (PBS Special Commendation, 2009). She was the founding editor of Orient Express, a journal of contemporary writing from post-communist Europe, and her other translations include books by Amir Or and Jaan Kaplinski. Published in more than thirty languages, she has eleven books in translation including Patuvachki Dnevnik, awarded the Zlaten Prsten (Macedonia). She has received Writer’s Awards from the Arts Councils of England and Wales and the Society of Authors, the US Literary Review’s Charles Angoff Award, and was AHRC Research Fellow at Oxford Brookes University 2002-5 and CAPITAL Fellow in Creativity at the University of Warwick 2007-8. Fiona Sampson is the editor of Poetry Review, the UK’s oldest and most influential poetry journal, and contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Irish Times, The Independent and the TLS. In 2009, she received a Cholmondeley Award and became a Fellow of the Royal Society for Literature. She is Distinguished Writer at the University of Kingston, and her books forthcoming in May 2011 are Music Lessons: the Newcastle Poetry Lectures, and Percy Bysshe Shelley in the Faber poet-to-poet series.
ooo
Zeus to Juno
He –
OO
You saw the way her body looked at me
OOOOOall address
OOOOOOOOOOcalling me down
She was so
OOOOOwell-turned,
OOOOOOOOOcurve and volume
her body presented itself
OOOOOClay –
OOOOOOOOOOI could mould it
OOO
She –
OO
You were taboo
not totem –
covered her
though your wing gave no shelter
your pale plumage
becoming shadow
your beak caught
in the net of her hair
OOO
He –
OO
When I entered her
OOOOOher death became my life
in her death swoon
OOOOOshe fell away from me
the more she fell
OOOOOthe deeper I pursued her
the deeper I went
OOOOOthe more lost she became
her body
OOOOObecame a forest of echoes
hills and valleys
OOOOOechoing each other, a language
I didn’t know
OO
She –
OO
The discarded body
lies in long grass,
flies and wasps
fumble there
On a summer day
the lost girl hums –
Kelly, Sarah, Jo, changed
into parable
prodigal hair
flung out
OOOOOObody agape
like a question
The scavenging crow
knows she’s beautiful,
outgrowing her name
in the noon heat
OOO
First Theory of Movement
I suspect movement mostly
has to do with light.
Flex a bare leg – like this.
Panels of pallor and shadow
rush to re-form,
slipping down the skin
like blinds released against a White Night.
OO
In the window
I glimpse my page turning
and mistake it for a gull.
Out over the bay
the birds’ display – wild fowl,
gulls, swallows
skimming the water –
OO
is so clearly delight
it makes me put down my book
to catch the terns
skywriting above the jetty.
They call each other with tender
nudges left over
from long journeys.
OO
Unimaginable what they’ve seen
and how light must tug,
a mineral strain
flowing through their eyes
into bloodstreams
that race differently, somehow –
the way spring makes us restless.
OO
Wishes and complaints
tumble together on a bed.
And it is spring,
this evening at the shore
where lilac’s in green bud
and behind sea-facing windows
a little skin is bared –
OOO
Angels of the Coffee Shop
In the village shop
you explain orthodoxy.
World is fallen light.
OO
Then you must be angels,
and the daylight
snagging the anorak
OO
on the back of each chair,
catching in your
hair’s mousy plumes,
OOO
is no accident
when it falls in panes
on the ordinary
OO
pine of your table.
Shy angels with carrier bags,
who know bliss
OO
is in and beyond
this local café, pray for me –
as hands and wrists
OO
flare into focus
and here and there
touch the room to rapture.
OOO
To Dream of a House is Always to Dream of the Body
A blur of branches
Smells –
linden and dust,
diesel, frost –
OO
You’re running between ghost-trees
toward a house
that keeps growing
from shadows
OO
always just ahead
Dusk flows in
at your heels
OO
Breaths like sighs
fill the dark,
shadows
shift
OO
room after dusty room
Somewhere
too close for comfort
a marble rolls
OO
along the floorboards,
drrrrr drrrrr drrrrr
dink dink dink dink Dink
OO
Now you’re
climbing a staircase –
dim symmetry
If only form
OO
were language,
if only these dim shapes
would form that word
you can’t remember
OO
Out of reach,
it stirs the hairs
on your nape
OO
Past lathe and joist
under beams that creak
in summer heat,
night waits –
oo
shadow-forest
By a moonlit window
you scrape your nail
along a wall
oo
Moth, rat, ghost
flicker and wake
in papery dark
OOO
Charivari
Fold the bed-sheet,
cross your fingers –
this lie you are
looks set to linger
ooo
like a rumour
or the smell
of last night’s supper –
Wash the dishes,
ooo
cross your fingers,
hope the story
won’t be questioned –
hope some more
ooo
when someone listens
(while you scrub
till your skin
glistens)
ooo
Difficult
to keep hidden,
bad blood leaks
around what’s given –
ooo
the bastard caste-
mark on your forehead
is déclassé
and whorish red
ooo
So cross your fingers,
clap and count –
till superstition
finds you out
OOO
The Coupling
Whenever I imagine
sympathy
I think of the Tube,
the way carriages
pass the engine-shake
to and fro
ooo
like a rumour –
that, say, they come uncoupled
and the engine slips free:
everything suddenly
growing spacious
margins,
ooo
steel striking steel
with a wide companionate bounce,
rails rounded in air,
and that blue
sheet-lightning trains rip
from the points
ooo
flowing away
like loose silk
down the line. Isn’t this it,
this loose-cogged
intimacy
in which something’s
ooo
shunted to and fro –
the low note
of wheel on rail
going on and on
through darkness,
then bursting into glare?
OOO
Angels and Dirt
OOOOOafter Stanley Spencer
Bodies the colour of earth,
clay-clagged
or rosy-pale as house brick,
the broad-armed locals
wrestle up.
ooo
Look – they’re everywhere
in the stone garden,
rising like hollyhocks,
like fresh loaves
leavening.
ooo
Here’s Dennis
and Poll,
all neighbourly beauty.
And here you are
as if for the first time,
ooo
setting out bread and salt
on the marble –
It was no struggle, you say,
this second birth
swimming up through soil
ooo
which crumbles
where you crown –
dust from dust –
but a yearning,
almost like love.
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