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