World Poetry Portfolio #10: Fiona Sampson

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.