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WORK TITLE: In Search of Mary Shelley
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 10/7/1963
WEBSITE: http://www.fionasampson.co.uk/
CITY: Herefordshire
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born October 7, 1963, in London, England.
EDUCATION:Attended Royal Academy of Music; attended University of Oxford; University of Nijmegen, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Poet, writer. University of Roehampton, Professor of Poetry and the Director of Roehampton Poetry Centre; Poetryfest, the Aberystwyth International Poetry Festival , founder and director; Orient Express, founding editor; Poetery Review, editor, 2005-12. Former concert violinist.
AWARDS:Newdigate Prize; M.B.E.; Society of Authors Award, 1996; Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship, Oxford Brookes University 2002-05; Kathleen Blundell Trust, 2002; CAPITAL Fellowship in Creativity, University of Warwick, 2007-08; visiting Research Fellow, School of Advanced Study, University of London, Institute of Musical Research & Institute of English Studies, 2012-15; Writer’s Award. Arts Councils of England and of Wales; fellow, Royal Society of Literature; M.B.E., 2017.
WRITINGS
Regular contributor to periodicals, including Guardian, Irish Times Independent, Times Literary Supplement, and Sunday Times. Sampson’s work has appeared in more than thirty-five languages.
SIDELIGHTS
British poet and writer Fiona Sampson is the author of over a score of books, including poetry collections and nonfiction works on poetry and writing, as well as the 2018 literary biography, In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Sampson has also acted as translator and editor of the work of other poets.
Born in London, England, Sampson was initially trained as a professional concert violinist at the Royal Academy of Music, and later attended both Oxford University and Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, where she earned her doctorate in the philosophy of language. Sampson was made a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 2017 and is published in almost forty languages.
Rough Music and Coleshill
Sampson’s 2010 collection, Rough Music, is a “fusion of modernist and lyric,” according to Guardian Online reviewer Ruth Padel, who also noted that as a former professional musician, this collection also “highlights the music of her voice.” Padel added: “[O]ne of Sampson’s themes is how limited language is, and this book belongs to the art of hint. The tone is controlled and lightly pitched.” The title to the collection of about three dozen poems comes from the old English custom of scapegoating, and is in part inspired by folks songs, ballads, and medieval carols to deal with themes from grief, loss, and shame, to ill health and women’s identities. “Rough Music denotes the mayhem of carnival, but this collection invites us to take plenty of smooth with the rough,” commented Independent Online reviewer Carol Rumen, who further observed, “Sampson’s mysteries and epiphanies are powerful because they register not only in the macrocosm of metaphor, but in the microsphere of form.”
Sampson’s 2013 collection, Coleshill, takes its title from the small Oxfordshire village where Sampson lived for a number of years. This gathering of fifty poems is a portrait of that place which is both real and imaginary. In the verses, readers find hymns to orchards, the sound of bees, and poems for ramblers. However, there are also poems about fear and grief. Speaking with London Independent Online critic Suzi Feay, Sampson remarked of this collection: “I think Coleshill has been in my books ever since I’ve lived there … . But I liked the idea of letting it be centre stage. Then I found it’s not hard to write about a real place but it’s really hard to write about real people. Because you want to–not exactly sanitise, but to see the best in people and it doesn’t make for a good poem! So I had an awful lot of achingly banal poems about friends and neighbours, all of which I kicked out. In the end, it’s psychogeography.”
Feay termed Coleshill a “richly rewarding and thematically coherent work, written with an avid attention to light effects, atmosphere, and the natural world.” Writing in the New Welsh Review Online, Kittie Belltree also had praise for the collection, calling it a “powerful, brooding portrait of a landscape both real and imagined.” Belltree further lauded the poet’s “incisive eye and linguistic fluidity.”
Lyric Cousins and The Catch
In her 2016 study, Lyric Cousins: Poetry and Musical Form, Sampson examines the similarities in the role, structures, projects, and capacities of both poetry and art music. The book is an expansion of the lectures she gave in 2009 at the Newcastle Poetry Lectures at the University of Newcastle. New Statesman reviewer Josephine Balmer noted that this “study considers poetic creation through the sounding board of musical theory, exploring the ways in which music–here mostly classical music or ‘art music’–and poetry might reflect on and illuminate each other.” Balmer added: “Sampson has the intellectual honesty to admit that there are no pat answers. In the end, like music, the writing of poetry, as well as the reading and the hearing of it, are all something to be experienced.” Writing in South Bank Poetry website, Katherine Lockton also had praise for Lyric Cousins, commenting: “This book confirms 2 things; Fiona’s status as an expert on musicality and poetry and her ability to break up any subject, making it accessible. I would heartily recommend this book as essential reading to anyone, even remotely interested in poetry. This is much more than a simple text book.”
Also from 2016 is the poetry collection, The Catch, a gathering of more than fifty poems, some of which were commissioned to be set to music and for other aural projects. Balmer noted in the New Statesman, “Like many of its poems, The Catch hovers on the edge of waking, a time of the subconscious, the non-verbal. Its lush and trance-like beauty is heightened throughout by synaesthesia.”
In a London Magazine Online interview with Theophilus Kwek, Sampson described this 2016 collection: “It’s a book about happiness, continuity, and wishfulness… I love poems that transform, or turn-around, their material in one way or another. I prefer myth to snapshot, and music to lecture, to put it another way! Also, the poems in The Catch are entirely in strict form: single sentence poems, in which every line has a regular number of stresses and each line must make semantic and musical sense. None of those chopped-up prose clunky line-breaks.”
In Search of Mary Shelley
Published to coincide with the two-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein in 1818, Sampson’s biography, In Search of Mary Shelley, goes beyond the usual tropes of that author’s life to discuss how it came to pass that a mere nineteen-year-old could produce a work so nuanced, dark, and full of psychological insight. “In Search of Mary Shelley is Fiona Sampson’s attempt to pin down this elusive woman,” note Deborah Mason in BookPage. Thus, the author does not provide a chronological rendering of Shelley’s life, but rather a series of vignettes, key moments in her life that provide a better understanding of Mary Shelley and her work. “Each episode is like a tile in a mosaic, beautifully crafted and essential to Shelley’s complex portrait,” further noted Mason. Sampson deals with Shelley’s guilt at causing the death of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, within days of her birth; with the effects of the rejection by her beloved father, the intellectual William Godwin, upon his second marriage; and with the impetuous and doomed love for the poet Percy Shelley. Mary Shelley also suffered the deaths of most of her children, her husband’s infidelity, and betrayals by those she considered her friends. “Sampson’s biography illuminates a woman whose genius enabled her not only to survive but also to triumph,” commented Mason in BookPage.
Others also had praise for In Search of Mary Shelley. A Publishers Weekly reviewer felt that Sampson’s episodic approach to this biography “creates an almost cinematic picture of long-ago events and succeeds in bringing an unconventional woman to vivid life.” A Kirkus Reviews critic similarly observed: “The author deftly plumbs the depths of Mary’s psyche to enlighten us about both Shelleys and reveal the profound effects they had on each other.” Spectator contributor Elaine Showalter also had praise, noting: “In Sampson’s eyes … [Mary Shelley] was ‘a great survivor’; and while her biography will not be the last word on the real Mary Shelley, it is a passionate demonstration of the elements that have kept her story vibrant for 200 years. It is moving, it is alive, it is a success.” Similarly, Washington Post writer Charlotte Gordon termed this a “brilliant new biography … [that] has many surprises in store.” Such surprises, according to Gordon, happen “not because Sampson has found a new archive of letters or dug up a trove of secret diaries, but simply because she has changed the angle of her lens, reimagining Shelley’s life so that suddenly new images loom and old truisms fade.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
BookPage, June, 2018. Deborah Mason, review of In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein, p. 23.
Community Care, January 26, 2006, review of Creative Writing in Health and Social Care, p. 42.
Kirkus Reviews, Apr. 15, 2018, review of In Search of Mary Shelley.
New Statesman, February 24, 2017, Josephine Balmer, review of Lyric Cousins: Poetry and Musical Form, and The Catch, p. 48; February 2, 2018, John Mullan, review of In Search of Mary Shelley, p. 44.
Publishers Weekly, April 2, 2018, review of In Search of Mary Shelley, p. 58.
Spectator, September 15, 2012, Alan Brownjohn, review of Beyond the Lyric: A Map of Contemporary British Poetry, p. 39; January 20, 2018, Elaine Showalter, review of In Search of Mary Shelley, p. 37.
Washington Post, June 7, 2018, Charlotte Gordon, review of In Search of Mary Shelley.
ONLINE
British Council, https://literature.britishcouncil.org/ (July 30, 2018), “Fiona Sampson.”
Cambridge Student, https://www.tcs.cam.ac.uk/ (November 13, 2017), Noella Chye, “Fiona Sampson on Poetry, Music and Language.”
Fiona Sampson website, http://www.fionasampson.co.uk (July 30, 2018).
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (August 27, 2010), Ruth Padel, review of Rough Music; (January 4, 2018), Rachel Hewitt, review of In Search of Mary Shelley.
Independent Online, https://www.independent.co.uk/ (August 20, 2010), Carol Rumens, review of Rough Music; (March 9, 2013), Suzi Feay, “The Strength of Fiona Sampson.”
London Magazine Online, https://www.thelondonmagazine.org/ (April 20, 2017), Theophilus Kwek, “An Interview with Fiona Sampson.”
New Welsh Review, https://www.newwelshreview.com/ (June 26, 2018), Kittie Belltree, review of Coleshill.
Poetry Foundation website, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ (July 30, 2018), “Fiona Sampson.”
South Bank Poetry, https://southbankpoetry.co.uk/ (March 30, 2018), Katherine Lockton, review of Lyric Cousins.*
Fiona Sampson
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Fiona Sampson
MBE
Fiona Sampson
Occupation
Poet and writer
Nationality
British
Alma mater
Royal Academy of Music; University of Oxford, University of Nijmegen
Period
contemporary
Fiona Ruth Sampson, MBE FRSL[1] is a British poet and writer. She is published in thirty-seven languages and has received a number of national and international awards for her writing.
Contents [hide]
1
Life
2
Work
3
Awards and honours
4
Selected bibliography
5
References
6
External links
Life[edit]
Sampson was educated at the Royal Academy of Music, and following a brief career as a concert violinist, studied at Oxford University, where she won the Newdigate Prize.[2] She gained a PhD in the philosophy of language from Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. She advises internationally on creative writing in healthcare, a field whose development she pioneered in a number of projects and publications. As a young poet she was the founder-director of Poetryfest – the Aberystwyth International Poetry Festival and the founding editor of Orient Express, a journal of contemporary writing from Europe. She has received a number of international writers' fellowships: I.A. Literary Association, Skojcan, Slovenia, 2015, Greek Writers’ Union Writers’ and Translators’ House, Paros, 2011, Estonian Writers’ Union House, Kasmu, 2009, Heinrich Boll House, Achill Island, 2005, Fundacion Valparaiso, Spain, 2002, Hawthornden Castle, 2001, Fondacion da Casa de Mateus, Portugal, 2001. She held an Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship at Oxford Brookes University 2002-5, a CAPITAL Fellowship in Creativity at the University of Warwick 2007-8 and a Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, Institute of Musical Research & Institute of English Studies: 2012-15.
From 2005-12, Sampson was the editor of Poetry Review, the oldest and most widely read poetry journal in the UK. She was the first woman editor of the journal since Muriel Spark (1947–49).[3] In January 2013 she founded Poem, a quarterly international review, published by the University of Roehampton, where Sampson is Professor of Poetry and the Director of Roehampton Poetry Centre.
She lives in Herefordshire.
Work[edit]
Sampson has published twenty-nine books, including collections of poetry, volumes on the philosophy of language and on the writing process. She has written prose on place, literary criticism - she contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Irish Times The Independent, the Times Literary Supplement and the Sunday Times[4] - and biography. She has developed a special interest in the Romantics, editing the Faber Poet to Poet edition of Percy Bysshe Shelley, writing a psychological biography In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein.[5]
Her work has appeared in more than thirty-five languages and received a number of international awards. Her own translations include the work of Jaan Kaplinski. Sampson's work is held online, in text and audio, at The Poetry Archive.[6]
Her fifth full poetry collection was Rough Music (Carcanet, 2010). It followed A Century of Poetry Review (Carcanet, 2009), a PBS Special Commendation and Poetry Writing: The expert guide (Robert Hale, 2009). Her volume of Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures on the formal links between music and poetry, Music Lessons, was published in 2011, and Percy Bysshe Shelley in the Faber and Faber Poet to Poet series, appeared in the same year (it was the PBS on-line Book Club Choice), reissued in 2012. Beyond the Lyric: a map of contemporary British poetry (Penguin Random House, 2012) is the first study of the poetry mainstream to identify the range of contemporary British poetics without being partisan, and to recognise the contribution of women across that range; not surprisingly, it was treated as controversial. Coleshill (Penguin Random House, 2013), a PBS Recommendation, is a portrait of place and feeling. Her seventh collection is "The Catch" (Penguin Random House, 2016). In 2016 she also published her study of such musical forms as the phrasal breath in verse, "Lyric Cousins: Musical Form in Poetry" (Edinburgh University Press, 2016). It 2017 she publishes a prose essay, "Limestone Country", with Little Toller.
Sampson has been a judge for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Irish Times IMPAC Awards (now International Dublin Literary Award), the 2011 Forward Poetry Prizes and the 2012 Griffin Poetry Prize, the 2015 T.S. Eliot Prize, the 2016 Ondaatje Prize. She chaired the 2015 and 2017 Roehampton Prize and the 2015 and 2016 European Lyric Atlas Prize (in Bosnia). From 2013-6 she was a judge for the Society of Authors' Cholmondeley Awards.
Awards and honours[edit]
AWARDS:
2017: MBE
2016: Slovo Podgrmec Prize (Bosnia)
Fellow of the Wordsworth Trust
Patron of the Anglo-Russian Cultural Association
2015: Povelji za međunarodnu saradnju (Bosnia)
2013: Poetry Book Society Recommendation,
Fellow of Royal Society of Arts
Fellow of the English Association
2012: Arts Council of England Grant for the Arts
2011: Poetry Book Society On-line Choice
2010: T.S. Eliot Prize (short-list),
Forward Prize for best book (short-list)
2009: Cholmondeley Award,
Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature,
Poetry Book Society Special Commendation,
Fellow of the English Association
2007: T.S. Eliot Prize (short-list)
2006: Forward Prize for best single poem (short-list),
Charles Angoff Award, The Literary Review (US)
2003: Zlaten Prsten Prize (Macedonia),
Evelyn Encelot Prize for European Women Poets Maison d Écrivains Paris (short-list)
2002: Kathleen Blundell Trust (Society of Authors)
2000, 2002, 2004: travel grants from Arts Council of England
1999: Arts Council of Wales Writer's Award
1998: Oppenheimer-John Downes Award
1996: Society of Authors Award
1993: Southern Arts Writer's Award
1992: Newdigate Prize, University of Oxford
Selected bibliography[edit]
BOOKS (excluding chapbooks):
The Everlasting Universe of Things: How the Romantics taught us to see the world, Crowood Press: Dec 2018 (forthcoming)
On the White Plain: the search for Mary Shelley, Profile Books: Jan 2018
Limestone Country, Little Toller: May 2017
Lyric Cousins: Poetry & musical form, Edinburgh University Press: 2016
The Catch, Penguin Random House: 2016
Russian edition, as Do Potopa (Before the Flood), Liberated Verse, Kyiv: Jan 2017
*Marevo, Ad Fontes, Kyiv: 2015
Volta Tractus Arte, Bucharest: 2015
Revenant, in Chinese, Intellectual Property Publishing House: 2014
Coleshill##, Penguin Random House: 2013
Bosnian edition, Sveti Hieronymous, Banja Luka: Feb 2016
Night Fugue: Selected Poems, Sheep Meadow Press (US): 2013
Beyond the Lyric: a map of contemporary British poetry, Penguin Random House 2012
Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1st edition: The Romantics Series: Faber: 2011
2nd edition: Poet to Poet: Faber: 2012
Music Lessons: The Newcastle Poetry Lectures, Bloodaxe: 2011
Selected Poems Jaan Kaplinski (co-translator), Bloodaxe: 2011
Poljupci I Molitva (selected poems), Bronko Miljokovic, Nis: 2010
Zweimal sieben Gedichte (selected poems), Wieser Verlag, Klagenfurt: 2009
Pjesme (selected poems), Croatian PEN, Zagreb: 2008
Rough Music, Carcanet: 2010
A Century of Poetry Review (edited and introduced), Carcanet: 2009
Poetry Writing, Robert Hale: 2009
Second impression 2011
Attitudes of Prayer/Attitudes de Prière (trans into French/Japanese/English) with printmaker Tadashi Mamada, Editions Transignum, Paris: 2008
Common Prayer, Carcanet: 2007
On Listening: Selected Essays, Salt: 2007
Day, Amir Or (translator), Dedalus, Dublin: 2006
Writing: Self and Reflexivity with Celia Hunt, Palgrave Macmillan: 2005
The Distance Between Us, Seren: 2005
Bulgarian edition, Balkani, Sofia: 2009
Hebrew edition, Keshev, Tel Aviv: 2007
Albanian edition, Poeteka, Tirana: 2006
Macedonian edition, Magor, Skopje: 2005
Romanian edition, Editura Parallela 45, Bucharest: 2005
Creative Writing in Health and Social Care (editor), Jessica Kingsley: 2004
A Fine Line: New Poetry from Central and Eastern Europe (editor with Jean Boase-Beier & Alexandra Buchler), Arc: 2004
Evening Brings Everything Back, Jaan Kaplinski (translator), Bloodaxe: 2004
Patuvachki Knevnik (Travel Diary), Knixevna Akademija, Skopje: 2004
Folding the Real, Seren: 2001
Romanian edition Editura Paralela 45, Bucharest: 2004
The Healing Word, The Poetry Society: 1999
The Self on the Page (editor with Celia Hunt), Jessica Kingsley: 1998
Hebrew edition, ACh Publishers, Tel Aviv: 2002
CDs:
Fiona Sampson, The Poetry Archive: 2007
Rough Music, with composer Steven Goss: Boosey and Hawkes: 2010
WORDS FOR MUSIC:
Bee Sama’ with Luminita Spinu: Kings College London Festival: 2015
Three sonnets with Harrison Birtwistle: Nash Ensemble: Wigmore Hall: fc
Tree Carols with Sally Beamish: Coull Quartet: City of London Festival: 2014, Edition Peters: 2015
Rough Music with Steven Goss: Guildford International Festival: 2009, Boosey and Hawkes: 2010
Fiona Sampson is a poet who has been shortlisted twice for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize. She has received the Cholmondeley Award, the Newdigate Prize, and the Writer’s Award from the Arts Councils of England and of Wales, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Trustee of the Wordsworth Trust. Please visit her at www.fionasampson.co.uk.
Fiona Sampsonwas born in London and trained as a violinist. Her early musical studies and professional career as a musician in Europe influenced her editing and writing. She studied at Oxford University and received a PhD in the philosophy of language from Nijmegen University in the Netherlands. Her poetry collections include Folding the Real (2001); The Distance Between Us (2005), a novel in verse; Common Prayer (2007); and Rough Music (2010).
Sampson’s poetry shows an attention to sound and the visual presence of poetry on the page. Ruth Padel described Sampson’s style in the Guardian: “The tone is controlled and lightly pitched; there is a lovely surface smoothness with the rough.” The attention to the aural qualities of poetry has also made its way into her essays: On Listening (2007) and Music Lessons: The Newcastle Poetry Lectures (2011).
Sampson’s academic studies led to a concentration on the connection of writing to health, and she is a founding member of Lapidus, the Association for Literary Arts in Personal Development. She has published scholarly works and works for general readers on the subject of writing and health care, among them The Healing Word (1999); The Self on the Page: Theory and Practice of Creative Writing in Personal Development (1998); Writing: Self and Reflexivity, with Celia Hunt (2006); and the edited guide Creative Writing in Health and Social Care (2004). She also published the writing manual Poetry Writing: The Expert Guide (2009).
Sampson’s translations and edited works have focused on poets from central and southeastern Europe. She coedited the anthology A Fine Line: New Poetry from Eastern & Central Europe (2004) and in 2002 founded the journal Orient Express, featuring European poets. She has translated work by Estonian poet Jaan Kaplinski: Evening Brings Everything Back (2004, with Jaan Kaplinski) and Israeli poet Amir Or: Day (2006, with Amir Or).
Common Prayer and Rough Music were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and Rough Music was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize. Sampson has received the Newdigate Prize and the Cholmondeley Award and in 2011 was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. From 2005 to 2012, she was editor of Britain’s Poetry Review.
Fiona Sampson
ChildrenFictionNon-FictionPoetryTranslationYoung Adult
Born:
London
Publishers:
Carcanet Press LtdPalgrave Macmillan
Biography
Fiona Sampson was born in London.
After a brief career as a concert violinist, she studied at Oxford University, where she won the Newdigate Prize. She has a PhD in the philosophy of language from Nijmegen University.
Her collections of poetry include Folding the Real (2001); The Distance Between Us (2005); Common Prayer (2007); and The Catch (2016). She was short-listed for the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Single Poem) in 2006.
She has written and edited several books on the theory of creative writing, including The Self on the Page: Theory and Practive of Creative Writing in Self Development (1998); The Healing World (1999); Creative Writing in Health and Social Care (2004); Writing: Self and Reflexivity (2005); On Listening (2007); and Writing Poetry (2009). Her study of musical form in poetry, Lyric Cousins, appeared in 2016.
Her books of translation include Evening Brings Everything Back (2004), and Collected Poems (2011), both by Jaan Kaplinski. She was co-editor of A Fine Line (2004), an anthology of new poetry from Eastern and Central Europe, and founder-editor of Orient Express, a journal of contemporary writing from the EU enlargement countries (2002-05). From 1995-2000, she directed Aberystwyth International Poetry Festival. Seven of her own books are published in translation. Patuvacki Dnevnik (Macedonia) received the 2004 Zlaten Prsten prize.
She is also known for her pioneering work involving creative writing and health care, and undertook long-term residencies in this field throughout the 1990s.
She collaborates with visual artists on commissions: with printmaker Meg Campbell on the artists' book Birth Chart (1993) and the exhibition My Grandmother, My Mother, Myself (1994); with stone-carver Alec Peever on public art work in Swindon (1993), High Wycombe (1995) and Slough (2008). The Memory Ship was commissioned by Ledbury Poetry Festival for a textile hanging in Ledbury Hospital (2002). She has also collaborated with Wanda Mihuleac and Jacques Rancourt on an artists' book, Attitudes de priere (Transignum, Paris, 2008) and with the Coull Quartet (2008).
From 2002-2005 she was the Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Fellow at Oxford Brookes University; for 2007-2008 she is Fellow in Creativity at the University of Warwick. Since 2005, she has been the editor of Poetry Review and in 2009, edited the Poetry Book Society Recommended A Century of Poetry Review. She contriubtes regularly to radio and to a number of publications, including The Guardian, the Irish Times and The Liberal.
Fiona Sampson received a Cholmondeley Award in 2009. Her latest collection of poetry, Rough Music (2010) was shortlisted for the 2010 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize. In 2011 she was elected a Fellow and a Council Member of the Royal Society of Literature. She received an MBE for services to literature in the Queen's New Year's Honours list.
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Critical perspective Bibliography Awards Author statement
Critical perspective
Fiona Sampson is the current editor of Poetry Review, the magazine of the Poetry Society in London, and has opened it up to international perspectives.
Her editorial in the Autumn 2007 issue, which celebrated the flowering of a recent ‘translation culture’ amongst leading British poets, states that ‘International writing is the context of excellence in which the best British poetry sits; P[oetry] R[eview] is committed to this vision’. She was previously a founding editor of Orient Express, a magazine of writing in translation from ‘enlargement Europe’ and has herself translated works such as Jaan Kaplinski’s Evening Brings Everything Back (2004). International writing is certainly the context in which her own poetry collections, Folding the Real (2001), The Distance Between Us (2005) and Common Prayer (2007), are most readily understood. These are a world away from mainstream poetry fashion, instead offering intellectually challenging but also emotional journeys, full of brilliantly unusual images and metaphors – often appropriated from linguistics, music and especially her religious faith.
The intellectual background to her multi-faceted work as an editor, poet and translator is unusual to say the least. Firstly, she has a doctorate in the philosophy of language. She has also had a high-level musical training. In her poems, music falls ‘like leaves’, and images of the violin’s ‘blind belly’, the piano’s ‘lucent shellac’, feature regularly alongside verbal snapshots of herself as a ‘kid / practicing endlessly, behind drawn curtains’ (‘The Velvet Shutter’). The experience of playing music seems to inform her concept of writing as a tightly-knit physical and mental process, even when things go wrong: ‘When a string breaks / pitches explode / spiral to silence / a flight of harmonic geese’ (ibid.). Composers and their music (even the ‘bell-like notes of John Cage’) offer her a way to consider the divine, and creativity itself. For instance, her homage to a Beethoven Quartet in ‘Attitudes of Prayer’ hails the work as ‘One hundred and thirty-one approaches / to the problem of God’, and imagines the composer ‘over and over / rehearsing what you don’t know, / soundlessly’ while struggling to transcribe ‘through the pall of tinnitus’. And ‘Messiaen’s Piano’ again alludes to the spiritual concerns of a composer, the music throwing ‘notes like handfuls of stones / to clatter / against a glass- / house God’.
Another side of Sampson’s work is a long-standing involvement with teaching creative writing, which, she observes, ‘affords the chance to juxtapose humour and reflection, the personal with the abstract’. Her particular expertise is in its therapeutic uses within healthcare, working with patients in hospitals or people with disabilities in day-care centres. She has referred to poetry as offering ‘a series of escape hatches’ in such places. In The Self on the Page: Theory and Practice of Creative Writing in Personal Development (1998), a collection of essays she co-edited, she looks at writing produced by people with Down’s Syndrome, and the elderly with dementia, noting how they can ‘take off the ‘pyjamas’ of institutionalized expectation and assume their own discursive authority’. Writing: Self and Reflexivity (2005) also deals with both practical and theoretical approaches to writing. A recent collection of her critical essays, On Listening (2007), is likewise concerned with issues around creative writing, community writing projects, as well as her interest in the problems of translation.
Sections of The Distance Between Us (2005) first appeared in Macedonian and in Eastern European magazines - aptly, for a work whose narrative moves across Europe, from Andalucian folksongs to characters in a Belgrade park. Its title may suggest that the distance between two people in a love affair – culturally and emotionally - is crucial to their understanding. The opening section, ‘Cante Jondo’ (meaning ‘deep song’) interpolates lines from flamenco, and describes the lovers as ‘Two people / just coming to a halt’) in a desert landscape. T.S. Eliot comes to mind. Indeed, Sampson’s modernistic use of irregular lines, her religious and philosophical bent, and some specific Waste Land allusions (‘who’s the third’, ‘O O’) rather confirm this. Sampson’s other source of resonant reference tends to be from prayers or the Bible, at times mixed disconcertingly with sensuality. Of course, her picture of sexual intimacy is very un-Eliot-like: ‘To enter you / or me / is to enter a forest / where everything’s alive. / Leaves stirring with private gesture’ (‘Mid-journey’). After a ‘Turkish rondo’, the lovers find each other again in ‘the grotesque elegant city’ and a hotel bedroom. Yet there is no conventional happy ending. Instead they feel themselves reaching ‘out and beyond our bodies // pulling truth out of our selves out of reach / into pain’.
Her most recent collection, Common Prayer, was short-listed for the T.S. Eliot prize and praised by John Burnside and John Kinsella (notable poets with whom her work has some affinities). Conspicuous for its religious references, it emphasizes the treatment of bodies – whether of lovers or of loved ones beset by illness in hospital. The tone of the book overall is one of celebrating creation. ‘A Sacrament of Watering’ for instance presents a marvellously realized wren ,‘her green breasts appearing among leaves, / her feet narrow as rays’. The epigraph to ‘Trumpeldor Beach’, which was short-listed for the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Single Poem), is from Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’. This might suggest a poem of religious doubt, but its brilliantly light-filled scene on ‘this mercurial Med’ [Mediterranean] seems affirmative. Its opening description of waves breaking on sand is again inherently musical: ‘a rhythmic / exhalation’. Standing on the beach is – oneself, amidst others, ‘One moment after another / taking you up / and dropping you’. Light is a favourite word throughout Sampson’s poetry, and here the speaker perceives, in the interplay of light and water, ‘fictional angels, / these bursts of supra-natural radiance’.
The other outstanding poem is ‘Scenes from the Miracle Cabinet’, whose speaker accompanies a patient to an operation. In a truly miraculous musical image, ‘Floor by floor and key by key, the lift / tunes the hospital’. Biblical language is interpolated (‘Saw ye him whom my soul loveth?’) and addresses itself to ‘your smoker’s body, / which I want to touch / with all the artifices of compassion’. In ‘The Enabled Voice’, an essay written for the Ledbury Poetry Festival about her experience of working with patients, Fiona Sampson refers to language itself as ‘a world we enter and move around in with pleasure because it is so full of possibility’. Her own work as a poet, editor, and translator, suggests this and makes her an energetic presence within current British writing, with valuable international perspectives.
Dr Jules Smith, 2008
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Bibliography
2017
Limestone Country
2016
The Catch
2014
Revenant
2013
Coleshill
2013
Night Fugue: Selected Poems
2012
Beyond the Lyric: A Map of Contemporary British Poetry
2011
Music Lessons: The Newcastle Lectures
2011
Percy Bysshe Shelley
2011
Collected Poems/Jaan Kaplinski
2010
Rough Music
2009
Writing Poetry
2009
A Century of Poetry Review
2007
On Listening: selected essays
2007
Common Prayer
2006
Day/Amir Or
2005
Writing: Self and Reflexivity
2005
Setting the Echo
2005
The Distance Between Us
2004
Creative Writing in Health and Social Care
2004
Hotel Casino
2004
A Fine Line: New Poetry from Eastern and Central Europe
2004
Evening Brings Everything Back/Jaan Kaplinski
2001
Folding the Real
1999
The Healing Word
1998
The Self on the Page: Theory and Practive of Creative Writing in Personal Development
Awards
2017
MBE for services to literature
2010
Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year)
2010
T. S. Eliot Prize (shortlisted)
2009
Cholmondeley Award
2007
T. S. Eliot Prize (shortlisted)
2006
Charles Angoff Award (US)
2006
Forward Poetry Prize (Best Single Poem, shortlisted)
2004
Zlaten Prsten prize (Macedonia)
2002
K. Blundell Trust Award
1999
Arts Council of Wales Writers' Award
1992
Newdigate Prize
Author statement
My first life as a violinist meant I’d always feel part of a wider European, rather than simply national, culture. An interest in poetry in translation arose naturally from this, extended beyond the European, and has exposed me to many extraordinary influences. Beauty and risk, the title I gave a recent issue of Poetry Review, has become a personal motto. Embarrassing to admit, it’s only more recently I’ve realised how important music continues to be. I’d love to be able to produce abstract form, as music does. Still, every poem starts out as an exploration – of the world of experience. Is this a contradiction? I don’t think so. I think making probably goes on in both these ways, and at once. Doesn’t it?
QUOTE:
In a London Magazine Online interview with Theophilus Kwek, Sampson described this 2016 collection: "It’s a book about happiness, continuity, and wishfulness… I love poems that transform, or turn-around, their material in one way or another. I prefer myth to snapshot, and music to lecture, to put it another way! Also, the poems in The Catch are entirely in strict form: single sentence poems, in which every line has a regular number of stresses and each line must make semantic and musical sense. None of those chopped-up prose clunky line-breaks."
An interview with Fiona Sampson
Apr 20, 2017
Fiona Sampson MBE is a poet and writer, published in thirty-seven languages, who has received international prizes in the US, India, Macedonia and Bosnia. A Fellow and Council member of the Royal Society of Literature, she’s published twenty-seven books, received the Newdigate Prize, a Cholmondeley Award, Hawthornden Fellowship and numerous awards from the Arts Councils of England and Wales, the Society of Authors and Poetry Book Society and twice been shortlisted for both T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes. Her new books are Lyric Cousins: musical form in poetry (EUP), the poetry collection The Catch (Penguin) (both out last year) and a prose study of Limestone Country (Little Toller, May 2017). She’s just finished In Search of Mary Shelley, a new psychological biography commissioned for the bicentenary of Frankenstein (Profile, 2018). Her website is www.fionasampson.co.uk
Congratulations on the MBE for services to literature and the literary community which you received in the New Year’s Honours! In the press release you describe 2016 as “an astonishing year”: could you tell us something about what you’ve been working on?
Thank you! To be honest it depends when the “year” starts. In 2016 I published The Catch (Penguin Random House), my latest collection. It’s a book about happiness, continuity, and wishfulness… I love poems that transform, or turn-around, their material in one way or another. I prefer myth to snapshot, and music to lecture, to put it another way! Also, the poems in The Catch are entirely in strict form: single sentence poems, in which every line has a regular number of stresses and each line must make semantic and musical sense. None of those chopped-up prose clunky line-breaks, the kind I think of as North American, with conjunctions or prepositions bulging from the ends of lines under the weight they have to bear… Oh, and not regular metre but the springiness of speech-rhythm: to put it another way, not regular feet but regular numbers of feet. I always think technique should bury itself so that it becomes incorporated, its effects subliminal rather than disciplinary.
Then Lyric Cousins: poetry and musical form came out in the autumn and was lots of hard work. It’s hard to be technical and write for a general reader at the same time. But I believe one should: it’s like teaching, even at the highest level: one should seduce in the telling! Lyric Cousins looks at musical forms (not, initially at least, at song metre but at forms prior to that, including breath, chromaticism, density) and how they work themselves out in verse as they do in music. I used to be a musician, so of course the topic interests me: but I also believe the links and similarities are highly pertinent for both poets and composers. I think, for example, that the grammar of a thought – of any thought – is limited to phrasal breath-length. These are ideas I started to develop when I was invited to give the Newcastle Lectures by what is now NCLA. Those three lectures are now expanded into a monograph. Unfortunately, this book is published by the very fine Edinburgh University Press, which means it’s rather expensive. I’m hoping the kind people who tell me they want to read it (perhaps they’re hinting that they’d like a copy – but it’s so expensive I can’t afford to give any away, which feels mortifying -) will order it from their libraries…!
Then 2016 also saw a couple of books in translation. Coleshill came out as Kolshil in Bosnia and won a prize, the Slovo Podgrmec; and The Catch came out as Volta in Romania. And then, this January, The Catch came out as Da Potopa – On the Brink – in Russian. You’ll notice that its title doesn’t tend to get translated “straight”: that’s because the multiple meanings of “the catch”, including a round-song, get lost in translation. Which is a fascinating topic I’d like to talk more about, if we have the chance.
What I’ve been busy working on this year are two prose books – and a poet-to-poet translation research project. The books are Limestone Country, published by Little Toller in May, which is about how a particular geology produces a particular ecology and so particular ways of life: my emerging interest in writing about place is definitely an interest in how humans live in and change and are changed by the natural environment. Then, next January, my new psychological biography of Mary Shelley is published by Profile for the bicentenary of Frankenstein. It’s called In Search of Mary Shelley: the girl who wrote Frankenstein and in it I am trying to take on the Romantic project itself and, without any fictionalizing, to excavate all that we can know about what sort of person Mary was, and how she experienced things, from the record which – just because she was a Romantic – she kept in letters and journals as well as in her published writing.
As well as writing and reviewing, and teaching and researching at the University of Roehampton, where you’re the Professor of Poetry and Director of the Poetry Centre, you will be Ledbury Poetry Festival’s poet-in-residence 2017. The Festival turns 21 this year – a coming-of-age of sorts. How would you describe its place in the constellation of poetry-related events and projects in this country?
The Ledbury Festival is now one of the leading English poetry festivals: alas, a few years ago Arts Council England axed the funding to the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, which was magnificently independent in spirit. Poetry International at the Southbank Centre in London has somewhat disappeared into their general fine programming; it waxes and wanes. Scotland has StAnza in St Andrews, which is truly international. But Ledbury is now consciously moving further, as I understand it, into internationalism. It’s always celebrated both national and international poets, so I think this is very exciting.
Actually I founded an international poetry festival in Aberystwyth myself, just before Ledbury was founded; from which I know that in those days festivals were not the fashion. Ledbury had tremendous vision.
There’s something very important about bringing work of real artistic excellence out of London, and particularly into the countryside. Visual artists have long moved out of London to find the space and affordability in which to make their work: think of the St Ives school, or Capel-y-ffin and Eric Gill. Musicians too: the wonderful British composers of the twentieth century and on, from Edward Elgar to Harrison Birtwistle, from Benjamin Britten to Michael Tippett, have lived and worked outside London. But publishing is very metropolitan, which means that British poetry has for too long been largely a village of Londoners (not a paradox, oddly). So festivals, which take on the European model of going out into the countryside to be festive, are a really important part of the calendar. They come in all shapes and sizes, from the wonderful new Kendal Poetry Festival which kicked off last year, and is intimate and genuinely suffused with enthusiasm, to Edinburgh Bookfest, where I’ll be later in the summer.
As the programme indicates, you’ve brought together a number of wonderful initiatives at this year’s Festival – I’m particularly excited about the spotlight on Romanian Women poets. What new spaces or conversations do you think these projects will open at the Festival?
It’s been lovely to curate two international events. I’m so grateful to Ledbury for the chance to do so: especially without having to raise the money and do the admin, which is usually the price of such plans and dreams!
I’m a huge fan of internationalism. I simply think it teaches one that there are other ways of going on… You might think that’s obvious in a culturally diverse country such as the UK, but I think that even our most culturally diversified individual poets get co-opted into the little-London mentality. And that’s such a shame. It’s surely provincial to think anywhere is the centre of the world, in our global society.
Also, to be frank, I just plain have literary and cultural curiosity. And I’m a wee bit suspicious of people who don’t. So I’ve invited six poets whose work I love, but under two specific rubrics (otherwise, there would have been nowhere for me to stop – so many marvellous poets I’d love to invite…). There’s a group of Romanian women poets, because there’s such a concentration of excellence there and because they are terrific, bold role-models for our still rather over-policed British women poets. Working with the wonderful Gabriela Mocan at the Romanian Cultural Institute, we are lucky to have secured Ana Blandiana, Magda Carneci and Liliana Ursu: three major, and incredibly diverse, voices in South-East Europe. And then there’s an event looking at the different ways poets live their poetry lives in different countries. For example, a mix of editing, reviewing and writing which I rather fancy myself – the poet as writer and intellectual – has long been regarded with (ahem) suspicion here in the UK. But elsewhere in the world it’s normal to the point of cliché. So we have European poet-editor Maria Galina, a Ukrainian working in Moscow at the great Novy Mir, Christopher Merrill, the North American poet who directs the Iowa Writing Workshop, that towering pioneer among university creative writing programmes, and Patrick Dubost, French musician/experimental performer, who really does experiment and really does perform…
You’ll be judging the Ledbury Poetry Festival’s Poetry Competition. Could you shed a little light on what you look for when judging competitions and prizes?
I think that competition judging is like editing: you have to do it in a spirit of utmost integrity and enthusiasm. You have to be looking for the best work, and to feel a leap of enthusiasm when you discover it. You have, also, to feel that you are opening a door rather than closing one; and you have above all to make your selections bearing in mind, and against the grain of, your own prejudices. You have to have a thick skin and just know that even if you make mistakes, you did so by accident, and in good faith.
I’ve done quite a lot of judging, and have come to the conclusion that prizes are a necessary evil. They’re not what poetry is about; but they can help poets thrive. At the moment I Chair the annual European Lyric Atlas award in Bosnia, and this year I’ll also chair the annual Roehampton Prize: it’s for the best single collection published by someone of any nationality who is living and working in the UK at the time of publication. An attempt not to close down our reading borders but to support on-the-ground British poetry practice when the main prizes tend to get won by foreign “stars” who come in, grab the goods and disappear… In recent years I’ve found myself judging a number of prizes, of course always with different combinations of co-judges (the Eliot, the Forwards, the Independent Foreign Fiction, the Ondaatje, the Griffin, the Irish Times Impac, etc). It’s a form of service to the poetry community, it seems to me. To do it properly and actually read all the submissions, I mean: which too many, to my astonishment, don’t. It is a lot of reading, judging a book prize: but you shouldn’t do it unless your attitude is Wow, I get to read all the books published this year for free rather than Oh no, all these books to read.
This all sounds like a form of outreach. Do you see a relationship between community work and art practice?
My own relationship to poetry was forged by community work. I was an early developer of poetry in health and social care; a practice in which you work constantly with people in tough places, sometimes in extremis. It’s a huge privilege and fascinating as well as moving. It taught me how people with absolutely no background interest in poetry are moved by the Real Thing, and understand its relevance at the great moments in life: indeed, need it then. That has shaped my writing, editing, and promotional practice ever since. It’s also why I was a mature student – I wanted to articulate what was going on and why I thought this was the real deal in the same way as high art. It was why I did a doctorate in applied philosophy of language. I ended up writing numerous papers and chapters and eventually books about it.
Poetry isn’t for a game of competition and ego. It’s for being the Real Thing.
Have you, then, found your style or process changing as a result of working with others, or on similar projects?
I love collaborating! The poet-to-poet translation project I’m working on right now with the poet Bill Herbert and the translator Francis Jones is a two-year AHRC-funded research project into what happens when poets co-translate. In the project we’re using intermediary, literal translators too, and working in trios. As well as measuring and examining, we want to mark out and celebrate this practice, which tends to spring up organically – indeed, chiefly at international festivals and fellowships. Poets meet each other, love each other’s work, and decide to collaborate.
I’ve also worked a lot with composers, naturally; and with visual artists. At the moment I’m working with a Swedish landscape photographer, Jan Peter Lahall, on a project about our environment – it will be an exhibition and an artists’ book. I think some poets and artists really love collaborating: Jan Peter for example has already worked with a Swedish and with a Ukrainian poet.
So to sum up, if poetry is to have a place in our communities and our lives, how can we best bring it into the limelight?
We have to keep the faith. We have to remember the real reasons for doing it, and return to them over and over. In the long run, that is what will ensure we have something good and real to hand on when the culture shifts again, and shifts towards more poetry (the way it is in many other countries right now).
And I think we have to keep the circle widening, so to speak. Not contract into defensiveness, lack of interest in international or new poets, and a refusal to engage with the wider community. We have to keep doing it over and over… in tiny local libraries in the UK as well as on prime time TV abroad, to kids in schools as well as on Radio 4 audience.
By Theophilus Kwek
Fiona Sampson on poetry, music and language
Story: Noella Chye Twitter: TCSNewspaper
November 13, 2017
Image credit: Renchun Ho
I first see Fiona Sampson as she ambles through John’s towards the Porters’ Lodge alongside Peter, her husband. She fits right in here, her mustard-yellow coat tinged with a hint of grey almost an extension of the faded brick walls of the buildings around her, and bright red scarf billowing gently in the wind.
By the time I meet her, my head is swarming with her poems, words and thoughts from nights’ worth of immersion in her collections of poetry. When we sit down, at last, in the Lightfoot Room of the Old Divinity School, one question springs forth before all others.
“I found, in your poetry, such rich imagery of… I don’t want to say nature, because that’s narrower than what I mean, but of the world, and a certain rhythm of the world.” I ask, “Do you see that in your daily life, or is it something that only comes through when you’re writing?”
She begins, “I like the fact that you said ‘rhythm of the world’, because I haven’t really put the two together before.” She seems to latch on first to the notion of rhythm, and says, “The rhythmic part is because I was a violinist in my first life, so I’m extremely interested in the relationship between music and poetry, or rather, I can’t help being interested.
“I don’t choose to be. I don’t think about it consciously, but it’s quite embedded in my practice. […] You can’t help but be listening as you’re writing.”
Then she turns to speak of her relationship with nature. “[I’m] kind of trying to fire up the potency of the experience of the natural world, but without saying it’s a sort of other, that it’s for the weekends”, and utters the last word with the hint of a sneer. “It’s life”, she finishes.
I soon notice that Sampson speaks often of the technicality involved in writing poetry, and more specifically, the effects of different techniques being used in isolation or together. At one point, when I ask about her experiences with both music and poetry, and the connections she has found between them, she tells me, “I have written a book about musical forms common to both music and poetry, called Lyrical Cousins. And that doesn’t look at metre, but rather fundamental things like phrase or breath, density and simultaneous things, chromaticism, sort of slippage in poetry’s second meanings and resonance.”
She seems to exhibit the same intellectual analysis when it comes to her own poetry. When speaking of her more recent collections, she tells me about the form she has been using, which, frustratingly, reviewers haven’t picked up on, she adds.
“It’s more like speech rhythms in which you use different feet. They’re all muddled up together. And they’re single sentence poems. And I’m finding that allows a fluidity.
"I always believe in poems that grammar should be accurate, should add up at every moment, but in a long, single-sentence poem, you can just shift it, slant from line to line. You can sort of turn a direction of a phrase, or pivot on a noun, and I’m finding that very rich in terms of the quality of thought it allows you, because it allows you that notion that everything is connected, but without becoming fuzzy and unclear.”
I want to ask more about her personal relationship with poetry, and say, “When you write, do you feel like you’re writing towards something?”
She pauses to consider it, then says, “I think I am. I think if there were a spacial conceptualisation of the process, that would be it. Or at least I’m writing into something. At the beginning of a poem, I definitely know which way I’m facing.
She tells me that this hasn’t always been the case. “I used to write longer poems, and I used to have a change of direction into separate parts, and so [I’d] sort of pause and face a different way, and often deliberately look around as if to think, ‘What might be the next thing that must be brought in to make a different note?’
“But now I tend to write unified single-page poems. So I know which way I’m facing, and I know there’s something…”, and here, her voice quietens, and she raises her hand in front of her, almost as if trying to pick something out from the air. “… there… that’s got a flavour, or sort of odour… something like that. It’s got a shape, but the shape isn’t discernible yet.”
I am struck by the ease, and the naturalness, with which she speaks of this spacial conceptualisation of writing. It reminds me of my surprise when I first discovered her past career as a performing violinist, during which she attended the Royal Academy of Music. For one to have been a musician and a professional poet seemed, to me, for them to have lived two vastly different lives. Music and poetry, when done at Sampson's level, with their unique capacities to envelope, and sometimes engulf you, seemed to take so much out of a person that there was little left to pour into another form of art. Yet here Sampson was, perfectly nonchalant, seemingly unaware of the rarity of her complete ease of stepping into these different worlds.
I ask her about her experience of both music and poetry, and if she has ever found that they bring with them different perspectives of the world, and equip the musician, artist or writer with them. She says, “Sometimes I think that for me, the idea would be that if I could write a poem purely abstract, or purely shape and colour,”, then hastens to add, “not that I like poems that fail the language — I don’t like that, I think that’s easy and halfway house”, and tells me, “but at the same time, I tend to have a three-dimensional metaphorical notion of thought. I think of thoughts and ideas as having shapes and destinations too, so… in that sense, making a line of poetry becomes very much like making a line of music.”
I'm curious if she identifies more with one form of art than another, and she replies with complete certainty, “Oh, I’m a poet.”
“When I was small, in primary school, I had a wonderful teacher, and I’d used up the schoolbooks. And I had a year when I was allowed to just write, which was blissful. I was 8… 8 or 9. I felt that I was a poet then. That was formative. Of course, it goes deep down into your personal prehistory.
“During my teens, I had the opposite experience with teachers. So then I had wonderful violin teachers, so I became drawn into that, and I think, probably, it was all proxy for being a poet. I didn’t know it at the time, and I loved music.
“[So] I stopped writing poems in my teens. I didn’t stop reading, but I read prose. I read a lot of literary prose. And non-fiction too. And then, suddenly, when I was 23, I realised that my heart wasn’t in music, and that it was in writing. It probably always had been, but I’d been in denial.
“I think that when one’s younger, one thinks you have this huge responsibility for your life, this responsibility to get it perfect, and that if you don’t, the weight of failure will be on your shoulders. It’s really hard, and it’s much harder if you’re high-achieving, as you yourself are.
“But one of the few good things about getting older is that actually, there are many paths to the source. And even ones which feel like big loops round are fine.”
When I first discovered her background in philosophy, after learning that she wrote a PhD thesis on the philosophy of language at Oxford some years ago, the philosophy student in me is dying to ask what her thesis was about, and if her acquaintance with the philosophy of language has influenced how she uses language when she writes.
Sampson tells me, “It was applied philosophy of language. It was late Heidegger and late Wittgenstein, asking what a poem is.
“I was doing that because I was a mature student at Oxford, because I’d been a violinist, so I was already working beforehand, and I was developing writing in healthcare. I wanted to theorise why it was an art practice, not just a theory in good works. In order to do that, I wanted to theorise what made a poem a poem.
“In the end, it became a bit like discourse theory. I ended up saying that a poem was a poem because it’s used as a poem. But I was very interested in Heidegger and Wittgenstein even though they’re both very different, because they’re both very radical critiques of the notion that language is innocent. They both say that language does its own thing, and I was very aware that the poems people I worked with were making and reading were things in themselves. They were cultural artefacts. They were events in language. I wanted to articulate why I thought that was to the point.”
Fiona Sampson has been published in more than thirty languages. She has twelve books in translation, and has received the Zlaten Prsten (Macedonia) and the Charles Angoff Award (US), and been shortlisted for the Evelyn Encelot Prize for European Women Poets. Her publications include twenty-seven volumes of poetry, criticism and philosophy of language.
From 2005-2012 Sampson was the Editor of Poetry Review; she is now Editor of Poem and Professor of Poetry at the University of Roehampton, where she is the Director of the Roehampton Poetry Centre. She’s also a Fellow and Council Member of the Royal Society of Literature, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Fellow of the English Association and Trustee of the Wordsworth Trust.
Sampson has received the Newdigate Prize, the Cholmondeley Award, a Hawthornden Fellowship, Kathleen Blundell and Oppenheimer-John Downes Awards from the Society of Authors, a number of Writer’s Awards from both the English and the Welsh Arts Councils, and various Poetry Book Society commendations. She has been shortlisted twice for both the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prizes.
Recent books include a new edition of Percy Bysshe Shelley for Faber and Coleshill (poems) for Chatto. Her Selected Poems have recently appeared in the US (Sheep Meadow, 2013), China (2014) and Romania (2015). Editions of her poetry in Ukrainian and Serbian are planned for autumn 2015.
Her latest collection, The Catch (Chatto), was released in 2016, as was Lyric Cousins: Musical Form in Poetry (Edinburgh University Press) with both receiving critical acclaim.
Her exploration of Limestone Country (Little Toller Books) was published in June 2017.
The Spectator called it “bewitching”, the New Statesman praised its “exquisite perceptiveness” and it was a summer reading pick in both the Evening Standard and the Daily Telegraph and a Guardian nature book of the year.
Her new book, In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein (Profile Books) will be released on January 20, 2018 to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein.
Pre-order your copy here: In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein
QUOTE:
richly rewarding and thematically coherent work, written with an avid attention to light effects, atmosphere, and the natural world.
I think Coleshill has been in my books ever since I've lived there," she goes on. "But I liked the idea of letting it be centre stage. Then I found it's not hard to write about a real place but it's really hard to write about real people. Because you want to – not exactly sanitise, but to see the best in people and it doesn't make for a good poem! So I had an awful lot of achingly banal poems about friends and neighbours, all of which I kicked out. In the end, it's psychogeography.
The strength of Fiona Sampson
After her controversial departure from 'Poetry Review', she has returned, sharper than ever, finds Suzi Feay
Suzi Feay
Saturday 9 March 2013 20:00
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Coleshill is a small estate village in the Vale of the White Horse in Oxfordshire. The houses, all dating from 1850 to 1860, were built in the Victorian cottage Gothic style, and today belong to the National Trust. The population is 200 – "the same as it was in the Domesday Book", remarks the poet Fiona Sampson, whose new collection, Coleshill, evokes the magical, odd place she has lived in for the past 14 years.
It's a richly rewarding and thematically coherent work, written with an avid attention to light effects, atmosphere, and the natural world. "What I like is the space, the landscape; it's very open and flat, water meadows. I'm not very good at suburbia. I like deep country, wild country," Sampson muses.
A wild poet among the tinkling teacups of the National Gallery café in London! Sampson, exquisitely dressed, coiffed and poised, could almost be any lady up for the day from the Home Counties, but for an edge, an intensity to her words. "I moved there from living on a Welsh mountain. I miss verticality," she says vehemently. "I like extremity." She's certainly had a lot of that in her life.
"I think Coleshill has been in my books ever since I've lived there," she goes on. "But I liked the idea of letting it be centre stage. Then I found it's not hard to write about a real place but it's really hard to write about real people. Because you want to – not exactly sanitise, but to see the best in people and it doesn't make for a good poem! So I had an awful lot of achingly banal poems about friends and neighbours, all of which I kicked out. In the end, it's psychogeography. Also I was going through a period in which I was doing a lot of feeling." She laughs, but it's laughter with an edge. "I don't want to say 'pathetic fallacy' but I couldn't separate it from what I was feeling."
The poems are very different from her earlier work, I observe. "Every book I start I think I have to find a new way to go on," Sampson explains. "It can't be more of the same. My last collection, Rough Music, was full rhyme, forms slightly invented by me, but influenced by medieval carols. The book before that, Common Prayer, was very loose and musical. And I do love writing sonnets of various kinds. My first book had syllabic sonnets – 14 syllables and 14 lines and all in one sentence. There are 14 sonnets in Coleshill and they are the most catholic sonnets I've written. I wasn't feeling very expansive, so it's much more like every word is a thorn or a shard of glass."
This observation strikes a disquieting note. As well as the music, the slow sense of seasons unrolling, the peace and the beauty expressed in Coleshill, there is also a profound darkness that comes up in poem after poem.
"Yes, it's a dark book," she replies. "It was written at an extremely unhappy time. But I think darkness is interesting. If you're me, you keep it out of your daily life. But daily life is about not letting your demons get the better of you. I don't mean poetry is therapeutic – it's not at all – but I'm interested myself in reading things where people have gone down the mine shaft."
Sampson has certainly been down the mine shaft in the past few years. As only the second woman editor of Poetry Review (after Muriel Spark), the most influential poetry magazine in Britain, she was involved in the crisis which rocked the Poetry Society in 2011, leading to the suspension of its Arts Council grant and the resignation of its board. Sampson left the Review in a flurry of recrimination and has bounced back at the helm of the recently launched, British-based international magazine, Poem.
"It's a love-it or hate-it name, isn't it?" she says, tackling her lunch with gusto. "You have two choices. You can either have a name that's like Poetry Review, or you have a name that's whimsical. And I think a whimsical name always ends up suggesting a school or a generation. Editorial taste and personal taste are not the same. So I think Poem advertises that. Also it's an international magazine and 'poem' doesn't need translating."
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She talks with huge enthusiasm about editing and promoting other writers. "When I took [Poetry Review] over, the circulation had gone down a great deal because it had become a specialist magazine, but we got it up again quite quickly in a year or so," she says cheerfully. "I think I made it readable. If the only contact someone gets with contemporary poetry is Poetry Review, I want every time it lands on the mat for it to be a box of delights. To have a sense of glamour and excitement, because that's what I wanted from it when I lived miles from anywhere; I wanted to feel encouraged and in contact with poetry. I think it's a lifeline."
Given that the spat split the poetry world into separate factions, I ask her whether she feels you automatically make enemies in a job like that? One of the Coleshill poems is called "The Death Threat", after all.
"I don't think you have to make enemies and it is important to be diplomatic. And I think I was extremely courteous. I don't think that any of the people campaigning [against me] had ever met me." And she had support from some good names, I add. "Yes, that was lovely. But the whole thing was extraordinarily painful. It changed my view of human nature absolutely. 'Everyone is muddling along, fundamentally decent, basically we're all the same.' I don't believe that any more. I also have a darker view of the press."
At the end of the interview, she says quietly that it would be a shame if the piece harped on about her recent woes, "because I've survived. I'm still alive, I didn't kill myself, which I nearly did. I don't want this to be all about Poetry Review, otherwise it's always there; it's a bloody albatross." Coleshill and Poem are the first, bold steps in getting rid of it for good.
The Death Threat by Fiona Sampson
From 'Coleshill', Chatto £10
'He changes shape. The
autumn nights
permit this, with their
mint of smells, the ash-and-damp notes of a dream you remember, blurred
as wings
flurrying into a windscreen: huge eyes, blackened by
the lights, because sometimes he's an owl. Or he's a swan, or "Caucasian male,
clean-shaven, age unknown" – or this plumed and
gleaming angel at the door, with a knife.'
QUOTE:
In Search of Mary Shelley is Fiona Sampson's attempt to pin down this elusive woman.
Each episode is like a tile in a mosaic, beautifully crafted and essential to Shelley's complex portrait.
Sampson's biography illuminates a woman whose genius enabled her not only to survive but also to triumph.
IN SEARCH OF MARY SHELLEY
Deborah Mason
BookPage. (June 2018): p23.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
IN SEARCH OF MARY SHELLEY
By Fiona Sampson
Pegasus $28.95, 368 pages ISBN 9781681777528 eBook available
The cultural impact of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is undeniably huge. It's difficult to think of a book that has been adapted, copied or parodied more than this 1818 novel. But if you ask anyone about its author, you are likely to receive a blank stare. Some might be able to identify her as the wife of Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, but little else is generally known about the young, almost girlish author who took up Lord Byron's challenge to "write a ghost story" during literary history's most consequential slumber party.
In Search of Mary Shelley is Fiona Sampson's attempt to pin down this elusive woman. It's not a conventional biography; instead of trying to reconstruct every stage of Shelley's life, Sampson focuses on key episodes that provide essential clues to understanding the author. Each episode is like a tile in a mosaic, beautifully crafted and essential to Shelley's complex portrait. Or, given Sampson's status as one of England's pre-eminent living poets, perhaps it is more apt to say that each chapter is like a stanza, resulting in a poetic exploration of one of the most influential novelists in English literature.
Wracked with guilt for causing her mother's death, who died shortly after giving birth to her, rejected by her adored father upon his second marriage and passionately in love with the feckless and narcissistic Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley was practically doomed to sacrifice her happiness, reputation and talent in service to others. She suffered the deaths of all but one of her children, the humiliation inflicted by her faithless husband and many betrayals by supposed friends. Yet she somehow managed to write Frankenstein, a novel that continues to engage and challenge readers.
Sampson's biography illuminates a woman whose genius enabled her not only to survive but also to triumph.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Mason, Deborah. "IN SEARCH OF MARY SHELLEY." BookPage, June 2018, p. 23. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540052014/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=78600419. Accessed 26 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A540052014
QUOTE:
creates an almost cinematic picture of long-ago events and succeeds in bringing an unconventional woman to vivid life.
In Search of Mary Shelley
Publishers Weekly. 265.14 (Apr. 2, 2018): p58.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
In Search of Mary Shelley
Fiona Sampson. Pegasus, $28.95 (336p) ISBN 978-1-68177-752-8
To mark the bicentennial of Frankenstein s publication, poet Sampson (Limestone Country) has created an incisive and emotionally resonant portrait of Mary Shelley, the brilliant woman who wrote that dark masterpiece. In an often speculative but persuasive portrait of Shelley's inner and outer life, Sampson takes Shelley out of the shadow of her prodigious, radical parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Wollstonecraft died soon after giving birth to Mary, and Sampson argues that the search for a mother figure never ended for Shelley, who maintained an antagonistic relationship with her stepmother, and drew close to female friends of her mother later in life. Themes of birth, death, and creativity permeated both Shelley's writing and her life. She experienced loss on an almost unimaginable scale, including the deaths of three of her four children in their youth, and yet persevered in her dream of being a writer. Because so much of Shelley's early correspondence was lost, Sampson often relies on conjecture to get inside her subject's mind and feelings. This approach may not be to everyone's taste, but it creates an almost cinematic picture of long-ago events and succeeds in bringing an unconventional woman to vivid life. Agent: George Lucas, Ink Well Management. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"In Search of Mary Shelley." Publishers Weekly, 2 Apr. 2018, p. 58. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A533555650/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=500f3da5. Accessed 26 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A533555650
QUOTE:
creates an almost cinematic picture of long-ago events and succeeds in bringing an unconventional woman to vivid life.
Sampson, Fiona: IN SEARCH OF MARY SHELLEY
Kirkus Reviews. (Apr. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Sampson, Fiona IN SEARCH OF MARY SHELLEY Pegasus (Adult Nonfiction) $28.95 6, 5 ISBN: 978-1-68177-752-8
A fresh biography of Mary Shelley (1797-1851), who created the monster that has become "part of our shared imagination."
Mary's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died just after she was born, leaving her and her older, illegitimate sister, Fanny, to be raised by her father, William Godwin. Since her parents were two of the leading political philosophers of the time, Mary received a fine education in the humanities, developing her reasoning skills. Godwin was also an anarchist and utilitarian who seemed to approve of the Romantic poets and free love--except for Percy Shelley. As his protege, Shelley met Mary when she was 16, and he was married with a pregnant wife. They soon ran off to Europe and took Mary's stepsister, Jane, with them. Throughout the marriage, they shared their talents and supported and encouraged each other. But Shelley handled money poorly, and they soon had to return to London to the first of innumerable homes throughout Europe. Jane, who soon changed her name to Claire, met and fell for Lord Byron and persuaded Percy and Mary to meet up with him at Lake Geneva. As Sampson (Lyric Cousins: Poetry and Musical Form, 2016, etc.) shows in this perceptive biography, it was there that Frankenstein was born, with Byron's challenge to write ghost stories. Begun when she was 19, Mary's novel, often considered the first work of science fiction, was finished and published before she was 21. With it, she changed the face of fiction, revealing the experimental spirit of the Romantic period. Unfortunately, their marriage was also experimental and filled with inequities. Shelley was a firm believer in free love, particularly for himself. After a series of pregnancies and only one surviving child, Mary still believed in their love, even more so after his death. Throughout, Sampson demonstrates why the story of Shelley and Frankenstein remains so intriguing, even today.
The author deftly plumbs the depths of Mary's psyche to enlighten us about both Shelleys and reveal the profound effects they had on each other.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Sampson, Fiona: IN SEARCH OF MARY SHELLEY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534375155/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b083dbfa. Accessed 26 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A534375155
Something about Mary
John Mullan
New Statesman. 147.5404 (Feb. 2, 2018): p44+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein
Fiona Sampson
Profile Books, 320pp, 18.99 [pounds sterling]
Why do we need to search for Mary Shelley? This year is the bicentenary of the publication of Frankenstein, a first novel by a teenage girl that has become both a modern myth and a perennial A-level set book. Its author went on to write five more, much lengthier, novels, but, although academics have tried to wrest them from obscurity, Valperga, Falkner and the others remain inert. The electricity of Shelley's first novel never returned to her.
The creation of Frankenstein has fascinated literary historians because it drew its energy from both the author's youthful intellectual encounters and the tumult of her private life. The daughter of pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who died shortly after giving birth to her, Mary Godwin, as she first was, grew up in the household of her father William Godwin, respected author of the once-famous work of anti-establishment, anti-religious philosophy, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Here radicals, poets and scientists met and argued, and the brilliant young Mary drank it all in.
One such visitor was the young Percy Bysshe Shelley, already a father but estranged from his wife, Harriet, pregnant with their second child. Soon he was eloping to France with the 16-year-old Mary, the prelude to eight years of restive journeying between England and Europe, shadowed by tragedy (both Harriet Shelley and Mary's half-sister, Fanny Imlay, committed suicide) and punctuated for Mary by pregnancies, miscarriages, and the deaths of three of her children. In the midst of this, at Villa Diodati on the shore of Lake Geneva, one thunderous June day in 1816, she competed with Shelley, Byron and Byron's personal physician, John Polidori, to write a supernatural tale. The result was Frankenstein.
At the beginning of her new biography, the poet and critic Fiona Sampson bridles at the notion that Mary Shelley is a "one-book wonder", yet she cannot escape just that notion. Her book is already four-fifths of the way through when Percy dies in 1822, drowned in Italy; his widow is not quite 25 years old. The remaining 28 years of her life, tenaciously devoted to earning a living and caring for her only surviving child, also called Percy, simply cannot command the same interest.
The story has often been told. So what can it mean to "search" for Mary Shelley again? Sampson's book makes no claims to unearth new evidence or to read neglected manuscripts. Hers is a "search" of the imagination. She wants "to bring Mary closer to us, until she's hugely enlarged in close-up". She wants to ask about (the italics are hers) "how it is for her". You will note the tense. In every sentence Sampson refuses the distance from which biography is usually written. The narrative is given in the present tense. As if we were in a novel, every event is a scene, taking place before us. It is all happening.
In the opening phases of the book this almost works. The lingering, agonising death of Mary's mother from septicaemia caused by her physician, is terrible in its slow drama, haltingly recorded by Mary's distraught father. Thereafter, however, the present-tense enactment is somehow presumptuous --Sampson's way of insisting on every page that she is right there with her protagonist.
Being with Mary means being scornful of some of those to whom she was closest, especially Shelley himself. Potentially there is something bracing in Sampson's impatience with his ideals, yet it leaves his allure an utter puzzle. He "resembles a type of highly gifted young man who receives a diagnosis of bipolar disorder but remains high-functioning because manifesting only on the manic end of the spectrum". His poetry is mentioned only when it shows damning evidence of his romantic interest in other women. He is selfishly neglectful of his wife's and children's health. He prefers "hob-nobbing" with Byron to looking after his family. His vegetarianism is imposed on his wife, fatally weakening her for child-bearing. He develops a doctrine of free love to allow him to be unfaithful whenever he fancies. Sampson encourages us to think that when his first wife, Harriet, heavily pregnant, drowns herself in the Serpentine, the child is Shelley's, though there is no good evidence for this. She thinks that he might have fathered a child by Mary's step-sister Claire Clairmont, their constant companion, before he even married Mary, and then another after they moved to Italy. Mary's denial of the latter possibility is further proof of its likelihood.
Sampson is surely right that Mary came to feel threatened and tormented by Claire, but this licenses the narrative to flatten her into a kind of erotically starved stalker. The biographer's psychological sallies are un-self-doubting. When she asks a question it is not to enquire but to foist a hunch on us. When she looks at surviving portraits of any of the bit-part players in her story, she is able to discern their characters with unhesitating confidence.
When there is uncertainty about her main characters' reasons for acting as they did, Sampson scatters motivations on the page. Wondering why Shelley might have encouraged Mary to sleep with his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg (as he undoubtedly did), she enumerates eight possible reasons, running from a sincere belief in free love to the possibility that both men were bisexual and were seeking a vicarious method of having sex with each other. You choose. Those who like their biography to be austerely reliable will flinch at the frequent introduction of some piece of psychological guesswork with "it's hard not to feel", "it's hard not to suspect", "one can't help feeling", or "it is easy to imagine".
The phrasing in which it is all easily imagined is idiomatic and cheerfully anachronistic. Mary has "a fatal attraction to charisma" but "lacks Percy's knee-jerk sexuality". Claire was for Shelley "an attractive alternative to working at the chewy bits of his relationship". Shelley's passing fixation with the teenage Emilia Viviani, confined by her father in a Pisan convent to await an arranged marriage, had long-term effects because, "It is hard for the cheatee to know where she stands or to move on to better things."
In style as much as content, this book is always Fiona Sampson's version of the story. She makes no bones about it. It's in your face. Take it or leave it.
John Mullan is professor of English at University College London. His books include "Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature" (Faber Faber)
Caption: Age of industry: Mary Shelley began Frankenstein at 18, and went on to write another five novels
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Mullan, John. "Something about Mary." New Statesman, 2 Feb. 2018, p. 44+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A529947640/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ae388327. Accessed 26 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A529947640
QUOTE:
In Sampson's eyes, however, she was 'a great survivor'; and while her biography will not be the last word on the real Mary Shelley, it is a passionate demonstration of the elements that have kept her story vibrant for 200 years. It is moving, it is alive, it is a success.
The maker and the monster
Elaine Showalter
Spectator. 336.9882 (Jan. 20, 2018): p37.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein
by Fiona Sampson
Profile, 18.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 320
There are few more seductive figures for biographers than Mary Shelley. The daughter of the radical philosopher and novelist William Godwin and the great feminist thinker Mary Wollstonecraft (who died a few days after giving birth to her), she ran away with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley at 16; wandered through Europe with him; bore their four children; married him; became the friend and companion of the other Young Romantics and their lovers; and at 18 wrote the classic Gothic novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. Scholars, writers and biographers from Muriel Spark to Miranda Seymour have been drawn to her story, and to the moment when, in the summer of 1816, at a villa on Lake Geneva, Byron challenged Mary, Percy and their friend, the painter Polidori, to write competing ghost stories.
Frankenstein was conceived then, but delivered two years later, and published anonymously on New Year's Day 1818. Mary would write a revised and expanded version in 1831, plus five other novels and many stories; but none was as innovative, archetypal and aesthetically influential as Frankenstein. Its bicentennial this year is the occasion for an explosion of conferences, annotated editions, plays, TV adaptations, films and books, including this new biography by the poet Fiona Sampson.
The book opens with an engaging description of the 1931 film of Frankenstein as a 'mixture of hilarity and horror', especially at the moment the scientist sees his creature begin to move: 'It's alive, it's moving. It's alive! It's alive, it's alive, it's alive! It's ALIVE!' In the book, Sampson points out, the moment of creation is more private and less exultant. Dr Frankenstein beholds his creature with anxiety, and 'the novel gives us a scene not of success but of failure'. Feminist critics have generally interpreted Frankenstein as a 'birth myth', in the words of Ellen Moers, in Literary Women (1963): a tale reflecting maternal fears, dangers and literary affiliations. But Sampson tacitly allies it instead with tragic and promethean horror stories, in which men of science attempt to create and perfect life, but can only produce monstrosity and death.
Sampson declares that her interest in Mary Shelley lies chiefly in the 'real person, full of living contradictions'. She wants to know how this 'unmarried teenage mother' became a major writer instead of a silent muse; how she drew on 'extraordinary resources' at the start of 'a sometimes heartbreakingly difficult life' to create 'two of our culture's most enduring archetypes' --the maker and the monster. Her bold and ambitious goal, she announces in her introduction, is 'to bring Mary closer to us, and closer again, until she's hugely enlarged in close-up'. Sampson achieves her close-up by magnifying the details of Shelley's journals and letters, plus the composition notebooks of Frankenstein, and subjecting them to minute interrogation and surmise.
She also, however, seeks to create an illusion of immediacy and intimacy by writing in the present tense throughout, a device which quickly becomes awkward; and by heavy dependence on psychological speculation and too many large rhetorical questions. The words 'probably', 'possibly' and 'presumably' are frequent, along with phrases such as 'it's reasonable to assume', 'it's hard not to suspect' and 'it would be nice to think'. Sampson does not limit her conjecture to Mary alone, but to the inner lives and unconscious motivations of all the players in her life.
Sometimes these interruptions and digressions are illuminating. Did Mary realise, for example, that to leave England at her husband's insistence, just as her novel was getting serious critical attention, was to sacrifice her chance of being accepted in her own right as an artist and intellectual? Or was she simply naive about how literary reputations are made? But more often the blow-ups are distractions from the complicated narrative, and would be less confusing if they were presented as interpretations, rather than as guesses about intention.
Sampson emphasises the drama of Mary's dazzling girlhood, and her determination to educate herself as a serious writer and intellectual, but she is especially effective describing her womanhood and widowhood. While her husband was alive, Mary moved constantly, holding the family together during his multiple affairs and as his literary career ascended and hers declined. By the spring of 1820, having lost three children, and still nursing Percy Florence, the son who would survive to adulthood, Mary had to face the disintegration of her domestic life and the difficulties of living with an 'increasingly successful fellow author'.
In July 1822, at the peak of his fame as a poet, Shelley drowned in a reckless sailing adventure in Italy, and Mary spent the rest of her life unsupported by his family, exploited by her own, memorialising and editing her husband's work, earning money to enable their son to become a solid conventional citizen, and lamenting the failure of her hopes 'to be something great and good'.
In Sampson's eyes, however, she was 'a great survivor'; and while her biography will not be the last word on the real Mary Shelley, it is a passionate demonstration of the elements that have kept her story vibrant for 200 years. It is moving, it is alive, it is a success.
Caption: Mary Shelley: a major writer, with a heartbreakingly difficult life
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Showalter, Elaine. "The maker and the monster." Spectator, 20 Jan. 2018, p. 37. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538248793/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=af3e8c14. Accessed 26 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A538248793
QUOTE:
study considers poetic creation through the sounding board of musical theory, exploring the ways in which music--here mostly classical music or "art music"--and poetry might reflect on and illuminate each other.
Sampson has the intellectual honesty to admit that there are no pat answers. In the end, like music, the writing of poetry, as well as the reading and the hearing of it, are all something to be experienced,
A muse is for sharing
Josephine Balmer
New Statesman. 146.5355 (Feb. 24, 2017): p48.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
Lyric Cousins: Poetry and Musical Form
Fiona Sampson
Edinburgh University Press, 240pp, 70 [pounds sterling]
The Catch
Fiona Sampson
Chatto & Windus, 80pp, 10 [pounds sterling]
"Songs," according to Tom Waits, "are really just very interesting things to be doing with the air." Much earlier, a vase made in the 5th century BC depicted Sappho with her book of poetry and the beginnings of a few scratched lines: "my words maybe mist and air/but they are immortal". For Fiona Sampson, whose thought-provoking study Lyric Cousins quotes Waits's typically insouciant comment, breath is also all important, giving "musical sense to semantic content, and creating a grammar for sound".
Yet Lyric Cousins, as Sampson stresses, has a far wider remit than song. Rather, her study considers poetic creation through the sounding board of musical theory, exploring the ways in which music--here mostly classical music or "art music"--and poetry might reflect on and illuminate each other. Sampson is not just a well-qualified but an entertaining guide. A concert violinist who became a much-lauded poet, she has also been the editor of the prestigious journal Poetry Review and is now a professor of poetry at the University of Roehampton.
Based on a series of Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures in 2009, her erudite and eclectic exploration begins with the various constituents of both genres, including musical time and poetic metre, form and phrasing, and the tricky issue of "meaning". She then examines specific examples such as song, opera and the sometimes overlooked aspect of performance, including music notation, as well as extracts from poetry, contemporary and canonical alike.
As she explains, the brief here is to think about poetry "not as music but as if it were music" (her italics). And so a discussion of the "disobedient" notes of chromaticism leads to the work of the composer Olivier Messiaen; in poetry, she argues, such notes are "whatever's put in the poem for sensory, rather than grammatical or denotative, reasons", as in the "bat English" of Les Murray's "Bats' Ultrasound".
For those who cannot pick out "Chopsticks" on a piano, this might seem like weighty fare. But Sampson's lightness of touch waltzes us along as she "maps connections and intersections" between the two forms, combining high and low notes with ease. We move jauntily from Gabriel Faure to Robert Frost and U A Fanthorpe via flat-pack furniture, or from W S Merwin through Marx (Groucho) to W S Gilbert. Meanwhile Charles Bernstein's radical Language poetry is equated with Arnold Schoenberg's atonality and John Burnside's "breath slur" lines are set against Mendelssohn's use of fugue. Sampson's own poetic voice remains perfectly pitched throughout; she sees the "turn" between the octave and sestet of a Petrarchan sonnet as being like "a hay-bale that needs to dry on the other side", while her central image of a train journey, moving us through space and time, drives on her arguments.
It seems churlish to complain about omission in such a wide-ranging work. But given the tantalising references to translation dotted throughout, not to mention Sampson's own experience as a translator of poetry, a chapter on these different performances of the texts would have been welcome. It is also a shame that, although there are passing mentions of Greek drama and epic, there is nothing here on poetry's and music's shared roots in ancient Greek lyric.
But these are quibbles. Sampson has the intellectual honesty to admit that there are no pat answers. In the end, like music, the writing of poetry, as well as the reading and the hearing of it, are all something to be experienced, "to be released by us". How and why we frame that experience comes down to our individual consciousness, sometimes shared, sometimes separate, fluctuating with time. As Sampson's train imagery underscores, it is not about the destination, but the journey; what matters is that "we are on the metaphorical train as it passes through the landscape".
Sampson politely refrains from including examples of her own work in Lyric Cousins so it is intriguing to turn to her most recent collection. The Catch, published a few months earlier, to find new connections in her poetry. She adopted her trademark free verse and short lines, we now know, because of childhood bronchial infections ("How I breathe is how I think," as Lyric Cousins explains) and yet her deep, resonant musicality remains.
True to form, some of the poems in the collection were commissioned for aural projects: "Stone Fruit" was set to music by the composer Sally Beamish and "Night Train" and "Neighbours" were written for the Festival of Sound at Magdalene College, Cambridge. In such poems language melts into sound, as with the "clustered voices" in "Night Train", which become "overlaid in patterns/like birdsong or weather".
Elsewhere she orchestrates a more overt intertextuahty. For instance, the painted bowl of "Parsifal" returns us to Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk, or "total artwork"--the subject of a chapter in Lyric Cousins. And in "Zoi", a stray street dog in Greece is illuminated in the evening star of Sappho's Fragment 104(a), "bringing back everything the bright dawn scattered", as well as transporting the reader to the beginning of lyric poetry--and music. But most of all, Sampson scores the delicate symphonies of the everyday world, such as the "blur of steam" rising "like a breath" above a cup of coffee in "Daily Bread" with
the word lying below it
waiting to be spoken you can't
quite make it out what is it
humming all day out of hearing.
Like many of its poems. The Catch hovers on the edge of waking, a time of the subconscious, the non-verbal. Its lush and trance-like beauty is heightened throughout by synaesthesia, a technique much discussed in Lyric Cousins: for instance, "the light that rose up like/the odour of plums and of vines" in "Harvest". Subtle and sonorous, these poems arrive "once again at/ astonishment/at the brink of dream". And, beside the cypress trees in "Arcades", they exist both within and outside meaning, beyond category of music or poetry, as sound and word merge until they
... do not
know the morning or the evening
when it comes
they only know this speaking
that rises and falls
in them like song.
Josephine Balmer is a poet and classical translator Her new collection, "The Paths of Survival" (Shearsman Books), is out in April
Caption: Resonant: Sampson's verse is alive to musicality
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Balmer, Josephine. "A muse is for sharing." New Statesman, 24 Feb. 2017, p. 48. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A488689249/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e1fd8a45. Accessed 26 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A488689249
Pigeonholing the poets
Alan Brownjohn
Spectator. 320.9603 (Sept. 15, 2012): p39+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
Beyond the Lyric: A Map of Contemporary British Poetry
by Fiona Sampson
Chatto, 16.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 284, ISBN 9780701186463
Fiona Sampson has produced a vigorous and valuable guide to 'the diversity and eclecticism' of present-day British poetry. It isn't a book for beginners but for those broadly acquainted, at the very least, with the work and influence of important poets of the last century--W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin--and perhaps rather confused and unclear about what is happening now.
Sampson herself is a notable poet, critic and editor who enjoys and admires a wide range of contemporary poetry, and Beyond the Lyric should assist any intelligent readers infected by her enthusiasms and wanting to update their knowledge.
Her title makes a reasonable assumption: that for many people, poets and readers alike, poetry essentially still means lyric poetry. She sorts current poets into 13 groups, of which three relate to this notion.
There are 'the Touchstone Lyricists', who write shortish, very personal poems and continue 'in search of a universal register of Beauty and Truth'. The Welsh poet Gillian Clarke, and the excellent Michael Longley, with his faultless evocations of urban and rural life in Ulster, are among these seekers. But Sampson also detects a further batch of lyricists, those writing 'the Expanded Lyric'--wider-ranging writers like John Kinsella, John Burnside and Lavinia Greenlaw. And she sees still another cluster, of experimentalists, practising 'the Exploded Lyric', though the late Barry MacSweeney, J.H. Prynne, and similar avant-gardists might have fitted into her chapter on 'Modernism'--where Geoffrey Hill, Professor of Poetry at Oxford, is daringly situated because of his secure place in 'the Eliot tradition'.
But 13 gangs of poets? That many, when the general reader tends to think of the 1930s as entirely the era of left-leaning social poets like Auden, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender? Or the 1950s as the period, exclusively, of the Spectator -led 'Movement' which made the names of Larkin, Kingsley Amis (as a poet), D.J. Enright and Thom Gunn?
Sampson finds she can't classify the Nineties or the Noughties in the same broad fashion, and in fact discovers a greater variety of achievement in these later decades. She argues with force, clarity and humour for each of her new, often surprising, categories, and there will be disagreements. But before poets complain about where she puts them they should pause and feel grateful for the attention they receive here, frequently with generous quotations from their work and an exemplary breadth of sympathy.
There is no attempt at a generation-by-generation survey of living poets born between the late 1920s and the 1980s, but instead a subtler chronological treatment of themes and tones in poetry. She begins with 'the Plain Dealers', including Dannie Abse, Anthony Thwaite and Fleur Adcock, who mostly happen to be octogenarians and whom she sees as bearing a postwar moral seriousness and authority. 'Bards of public libraries and state education', these are storytellers 'producing clarity from the chaos of experience'.
Against their austere quality 'the Dandies' obviously react, wearing 'linguistic fancy dress' and setting off in pursuit of style. Craig Raine, labelled 'Martian' for writing about things on earth as seen by a visitor from Mars, certainly belongs here, as do Christopher Reid and Glyn Maxwell. But Hugo Williams, author of touching and offbeat love poems, might wonder why he doesn't rank as a very special sort of modern lyricist.
The gulfs between the Plain Dealers, the Lyricists and the Dandies are unquestionably wide. But even wider gaps open up between all of those and elegant 'Oxford Elegists' like John Fuller (their presiding spirit and arguably the best poet now writing), Andrew Motion, and Alan Jenkins--not an Oxonian, but the elegiac nature of his 'feelingful public verse' gives him honorary membership. Gradually Sampson's various categories begin to make sense, and the placing of well-known poets, with sharp and detailed characterisation of their work, becomes convincing. Or mostly so.
Afro-Caribbeans like Linton Kwesi Johnson and Benjamin Zephaniah can clearly join the irrepressible Scot W.N. (Bill) Herbert in the 'Free and Easy' section, but it is difficult to see why Simon Armitage is there, rather than with Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy and the remarkable Paul Farley among the 'Anecdotalists', new and not so plaindealing storytellers.
Of course 'the Iambic Legislators', proponents of the Shakespearean blank verse uttered naturally by all good English speakers wherever they grew up, stand firmly apart from all of the above: Tony Harrison and Sean O'Brien (northerners), Douglas Dunn (Scottish), Peter Porter (Australian) and Gwyneth Lewis (Welsh). As do the 'New Formalists', sharing their sense of the crucial importance of strict form in poetry, the Scot Don Paterson being 'their leading contemporary practitioner-advocate'. The practitioners of 'Post-Surrealism' (though there has never been a strong vein of surrealism itself in British poetry) together with the pursuers of 'Mythopoesis'--poets 'developing a particular correspondence between poetry and myth'--complete Sampson's baker's dozen of tendencies.
In the end the willing general reader still has a large, probably bewildering, choice of what to explore; though this is one of the book's many virtues, because Sampson is generous and persuasive in her explanation of what all of these poets are about. The nearest she gets to severe judgments is in quietly missing out a few names, giving others merely a courteous nod, and emphatically stating what she can't stand. She deplores the 'featureless' and 'inert' work produced by poets who don't accept that 'making a poem involves transformational effort'.
This is stern stuff, but worth declaring because a deal of limp and spiritless work must have landed on her editorial mat (or, these days, in her inbox) at the Poetry Review and been rejected--and nevertheless indulgently published elsewhere.
Sampson is too serious and passionate about poetry to put up with that recognisable kind of weak writing, and emerges as the best kind of guide: encouraging, enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and thoroughly aware of which routes to avoid.
Brownjohn, Alan
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Brownjohn, Alan. "Pigeonholing the poets." Spectator, 15 Sept. 2012, p. 39+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A305563187/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=81f6a209. Accessed 26 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A305563187
book reviews
Community Care. (Jan. 26, 2006): p42.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 Reed Business Information Ltd.
http://www.communitycare.co.uk/Home/Default.aspx
Full Text:
Creative Writing in Health and Social Care ----- Edited by Fiona Sampson, Jessica Kingsley ISBN 184310136x, price [pounds sterling]19.95
From children in Macedonia to people with dementia in Britain this book explores the therapeutic use of poetry and storytelling in health and social care settings, writes Helen Howard. This collection of articles reminds us that writing itself is the goal. The rewards of writing in health and social care settings are the same ones that reward all writing and there are many examples here of what those are. This book aims to map the range of good arts practice and guide the traveller. It illustrates a variety of care contexts in the first section and provides analysis in the second half of differing art therapies. It is designed with a wide audience in mind and so some chapters were more relevant to me than others. But whether you are a provider or practitioner, or a participant in creative writing you will find something here. Helen Howard is a writer on health and social care and Open University lecturer
Children Law: An Interdisciplinary Handbook ----- Charles Prest and Stephen Wildblood QC, Family Law ISBN 0853089442, [pounds sterling]45
Potential buyers should be aware that this is a specialist legal reference book - it is not an introduction to children law, writes Russell Holland. It covers children law purely within the family justice system and is arranged by the nature of materials provided (statutes, statutory instruments, case law) and not by topic. As such it is not as accessible as some legal textbooks with cases and materials, but is more comprehensive in terms of sources provided so will be highly useful to those working within the family justice system. The key strength is the extensive range of primary sources of statutes, practice directions and case law. As such the handbook serves as a complete and well-structured reference tool for access to key legal material, beginning by reference to relevant international law. While each chapter contains an overview designed for non-lawyers, the layout is unimaginative and can be a bit daunting for those new to the law. But for law students or those with some experience in this area, the overviews will provide more in-depth specialist insights than general texts on family law. Russell Holland, Bar Pro Bono Unit
What Does Adopted Mean? A Young Child's Guide to Adoption ----- Edith Nicholls, Russell House Publishing ISBN 190385573X, [pounds sterling]15.99
Too many words and not enough pictures; and the ones that are used are not very good. These are all problems with this book. Also it looks a bit cheap because it is not a proper book (it is ring-bound), write Zoe (aged 11) and Lois (10). It is meant to be for young children but we found it difficult to understand, even when our social worker tried to explain it. There are lots of long words and some made up ones which do not help. For instance, they call birth parents "your born-tos" but we think "Tummy Mummy" is better. It is good to have books to explain adoption because it makes it easier to start talking about it, but we think the best ones are where you can draw or write in it to make it more like your own story. Zoe and Lois are adopted children
The Art of Counselling ----- Rollo May, Gardner Press ISBN 0285650998, [pounds sterling]9.99
Reading this book was for me like reading an ancient text that has been lost or forgotten for centuries, writes Richard Curen. Although May's book was originally published in 1989, the layout and choice of font makes this book look old. The chapters read like a textbook on theology, with one section devoted to morality and another to religion. The publishers call this book "a true classic" and I agree, but while the works of Freud continue to offer diamonds, I suspect The Art of Counselling would offer little to others practising or interested in counselling. This book might be of most use to those intending to work in a pastoral setting, but even then I know of more accessible books for those wishing to gain a better understanding of personality and how to offer counselling. Richard Curen is a qualified counsellor and director of Respond, a national learning difficulties charity
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"book reviews." Community Care, 26 Jan. 2006, p. 42. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A141298612/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a565704b. Accessed 26 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A141298612
QUOTE:
brilliant new biography,
has many surprises in store. Not because Sampson has found a new archive of letters or dug up a trove of secret diaries, but simply because she has changed the angle of her lens, reimagining Shelley's life so that suddenly new images loom and old truisms
Book World: In this brilliant biography, the author of 'Frankenstein' comes ALIVE!
Charlotte Gordon
The Washington Post. (June 7, 2018): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Full Text:
Byline: Charlotte Gordon
In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein
By Fiona Sampson
Pegasus. 368 pp. $28.95
---
Even for those of us who thought we knew everything about the young author of "Frankenstein," Fiona Sampson's brilliant new biography, "In Search of Mary Shelley," has many surprises in store. Not because Sampson has found a new archive of letters or dug up a trove of secret diaries, but simply because she has changed the angle of her lens, reimagining Shelley's life so that suddenly new images loom and old truisms fade.
The historical Mary Shelley is still here (1797-1851), along with all the remarkable incidents and associations, including her relationship with Percy Shelley, her friendship with Lord Byron and her creation of that most famous gothic tale 200 years ago. But the ground on which she stands, the very apartments in which she lived, are freshly illuminated, newly imagined, helping us draw closer to this fascinating but elusive writer.
All biographers know that Mary Shelley grew up at No. 29, the Polygon, a development north of central London, near today's St. Pancras Station. Many have tried to re-create the Polygon, which is no longer standing, by describing the contours of the buildings and the calls of the vendors who hawked their wares in the streets. Others have used the architect's plans to describe the mantels, the wrought iron balconies, the high ceilings and polished floors. But Sampson, a poet and scholar at the University of Roehampton in London, does one better - something so simple and yet so astonishing that it sums up the magic of this book: She imagines the light streaming through the Polygon's windows, illuminating Shelley's childhood.
"The Polygon has tall, modern windows," she writes. "Sunlight reaches right into the rooms. As yet there are no buildings close by to interrupt its progress across their polished floors, and the people who live here can always tell roughly what time of day it is. At the turn of the new century, letting light in has become more important than keeping out the cold: at least, for fashionable architects and their patrons. ... There's an aspect of display to the big windows of houses built, like this, in the Palladian style. Through their multiplying panes passers-by can see every detail of the rooms and the people who live in them. At times it's almost as if the households of the Polygon are performing for the street."
In Sampson's skillful hands, the play of light becomes not only an evocation of life inside the house, but also an entry into the historical setting. That the Polygon's windows are large, Sampson points out, is evidence of modernity, especially when compared to the tiny-paned windows of the old houses in central London that "shut out more than the cold. They also exclude the outside world."
These glimpses of early 19th-century London bring Shelley closer to the reader, particularly as Sampson frequently writes in the present tense. In fact, this is not simply a biography; it is, as the title tells us, a record of Sampson's search for Shelley - a point she reminds us of by using questions like bread crumbs, steering us along the path of discovery. For instance, after re-creating the tragic death of Mary Shelley's mother, the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, 10 days after giving birth, Sampson pauses and wonders:
"What must it be like for a child to grow in the house where her mother has died, to pass the door of the death chamber on the landing every day? Perhaps Wollstonecraft's daughters open it sometimes and step inside, looking around at the smallish, ordinary bedroom. Do they expect its banal bed and dressing table to communicate something? How can such big meaning be crammed into such a domestic space?"
Unanswerable though these questions are, they invite us to see the lamps and the stairs, the bedrooms and chairs, just as Shelley saw them - for a brief and exciting moment to inhabit Shelley's body.
To drive this point home, Sampson addresses us directly, making us fellow travelers on the hunt for Shelley. She quotes a passage from the journal of Mary's young lover, the poet Percy Shelley, which describes the pair's escape across the Channel from their enraged families: "Mary was ill as we travelled, yet in that illness what pleasure and security did we not share!" Then Sampson remarks: "I've always wondered whether this passage is in code. ... Mary has always been a poor traveller. ... But she is also possibly in the earliest stages of pregnancy."
Sampson arrives at this insight through the rigor of her scholarship and her imaginative process. In fact, if there is a lesson here, it is that the biographer must rely on both. It is not enough to supply us with a historical figure's street address, the biographer must re-create the street, the house and the rooms of that house so that we can encounter a living being. This is not so different a project from Mary Shelley's own: to breathe life into the dead, to bring new life to the archives of the past.
---
Gordon, a professor of humanities at Endicott College, is the author, most recently, of "Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley."
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gordon, Charlotte. "Book World: In this brilliant biography, the author of 'Frankenstein' comes ALIVE!" Washington Post, 7 June 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A541671382/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=37c78fee. Accessed 26 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A541671382
In Search of Mary Shelley by Fiona Sampson review – the girl who wrote Frankenstein
Two hundred years after the creation of the gothic masterpiece, a new study tracks down the woman behind the monster
Rachel Hewitt
Thu 4 Jan 2018 07.30 GMT
Last modified on Sat 6 Jan 2018 00.11 GMT
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Seeking inspiration … Elle Fanning as the writer in the film Mary Shelley, out in the UK this summer. Photograph: Allstar/HANWAY FILMS
W
hen Mary Godwin (later Mary Shelley) was a high-spirited teenager, on the onset of puberty, one of her arms became “mysteriously handicapped”. Perhaps suffering from severe eczema or psoriasis, the arm grew “like a monstrous appendage stitched from some other body on to her own”. It was a formative bodily episode that led to the young woman being sent away from her family home in the stinking streets around London’s Smithfield market to recuperate in the sea air of Ramsgate. In the longer term, it may have contributed imaginative material for the corporeal form of the “creature she invents in her first novel [who] will be stitched together by Frankenstein”.
In In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein, published to mark the novel’s bicentenary, Fiona Sampson sets out to retrieve Mary Shelley – precocious child, celebrated writer, anguished mother and wife – from the shadow of the celebrity friends and family by whom she is often obscured: from her parents Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin; her husband, the charismatic atheist and free love advocate, Percy Bysshe Shelley; her friend and literary confidant, Lord Byron; even Mary’s own creation, Frankenstein’s monster, one of literature’s most enduring archetypes. Mary has “gone missing” from literary history, Sampson claims; she has “fade[d] to white” like Frankenstein’s creature who “goes out, alone again, onto the Arctic ice to die”.
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Sampson attributes Mary’s supposed erasure to a combination of celebrity eclipse, compounded by “some hidden hand’s” destruction of her correspondence, the loss of her juvenilia in a trunk mislaid in Paris during her 1814 elopement, disappearance of volumes of her journal; and Mary’s own reticence, resulting in the lack of published autobiographical material.
In the face of this archival dearth, Sampson nevertheless builds a personality, piecing together what it must have been like to grow up and live as Mary Shelley, until we can “see the actual texture of her existence”. In places, Sampson is as adept as Frankenstein himself, giving life to a figure who convincingly aches and bleeds. She points out the importance of the sex of Frankenstein’s author, noting that the period in which Mary writes the book, from the autumn of 1816 to December 1817, is full of “intensely corporeal changes”: births (of Mary’s third child, Clara, and of her stepsister Claire Clairmont’s daughter Alba, later renamed Allegra); and deaths (the suicides of Mary’s sister Fanny and Percy’s first wife Harriet).
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Mary Shelley … precocious child, celebrated writer, anguished mother and wife. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Frankenstein becomes a lens through which we peer into Mary’s embodied self, and vice versa. We are invited to imagine inhabiting the infected arm, the postpartum body, the “compound tiredness that must come from breastfeeding while living on an inadequately understood vegetarian diet”, the miscarriages that ensured “Mary cannot avoid knowing … that the creation of life is costly” and difficult, and “to give life to a full-term, fully human ‘progeny’ more difficult still”.
The landscapes and interiors within which Sampson’s subject moves are as crisply rendered as Frankenstein’s own plane of Arctic ice: the swiftly urbanising fields north of London’s Pancras Place, where Mary is born; the Alpine glacier that her journal recorded as “the most desolate place in the world”; the palatial rooms of a handsome palazzo in Pisa in which the Shelleys lived in splendid isolation.
Towards the end of her life, aged 51, we read of Mary attempting not to “vegetate”, in her words, at her dead husband’s birthplace, Field Place in Sussex, accompanied by her surviving son, Percy Florence, and her daughter-in-law. Sampson warns that the apparent symmetry of her later years, between her marriage and her later return to Shelley’s childhood home, risks fuelling a “deeply conservative fantasy” that the events of Mary’s life were inevitable all along. Sampson tries to rescue her from such patriarchal determinism by structuring her biography as a series of choppy freeze frames’, static painterly tableaux in Mary’s life around which she traces the run-up and fall-out. Chapters are centred around, for example, a tragically illusoryscene in which Wollstonecraft presents Godwin with a healthy baby, lit by oil lamps like a study “of the Holy Family by Rembrandt”; or, 17 years later, the moment when the writer Thomas Jefferson Hogg witnesses a tartan-clad teenage Mary appear behind a door and Percy Shelley darts “out of the room, like an arrow from the bow of the far-shooting king”; and “the most famous tableau of Mary’s life”, as she and Percy sit in the drawing room of Villa Diodati, on the shores of Lake Geneva, shortly before the challenge to write a ghost story is issued.
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Hadley Fraser as Frankenstein and Shuler Hensley as the monster in Young Frankenstein at the Garrick theatre. Photograph: Manuel Harlan
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The freeze frame structure allows Sampson to gloss over periods of life that she considers largely superfluous to the meat of Mary’s intellectual achievements, particularly the later years that don’t contribute to the writing of Frankenstein. But this methodology – this sifting of a life according to moments that posterity has deemed consequential – sits awkwardly at odds with Sampson’s self-stated biographer’s duty to “hugely enlarge” Mary and try to comprehend her. So when, for example, Mary, Percy, Claire and their children set out for a continental trip in 1818, and we are warned that “four years from now all three of the infants who make that rough March crossing of the English Channel will be dead of infectious diseases”, we are abruptly disconnected from Mary’s “inner life” and brought closer, instead, to the biographer’s position of retrospective knowledge.
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Despite her aims to understand Mary’s thoughts and motivations, Sampson – herself a poet, editor of Percy Shelley’s poetry and literary critic – is acutely aware of the limitations of “inner life” biography. Early in In Search of Mary Shelley, she considers the importance of mirrors: the stepsister in whom Mary saw herself reflected and distorted; the necessity of the “blind side” that transforms a sheet of glass into a mirror; and the advent of the Spiegelkabinett, the specially arranged German mirror cabinets that dared users to discover “a hitherto unsuspected ugliness” (a metaphor for the Romantics’ discovery of the irrational, unruly subconscious lurking behind the apparent serenity of the conscious, rational mind).
Biography, too, is a form of mirror. It both reflects and distorts, not only its subject, but the biographer too. Biographers are the blind side to the reflection, the Frankenstein to the pieced-together creature. In 1835, Mary reflected on how “the true end of biography” was to deduce “the peculiar character of the man” from the “minute, yet characteristic details” that punctuated the life: from the specifics of place and clothing and bodily experience in which Sampson’s biography excels. And it is their shared faith in biography as a valuable exploration of character, despite the imperfections of the genre, that is perhaps what brings Sampson closest in her search for Mary Shelley.
• In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein is published by Profile. To order a copy for £13.99 (RRP £18.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
QUOTE:
powerful, brooding portrait of a landscape both real and imagined.
incisive eye and linguistic fluidity
REVIEW by Kittie Belltree
NWR Issue 100
Coleshill
by Fiona Sampson
Coleshill, a village in the Vale of the White Horse, Oxfordshire, with a population of just 200, has been home to Fiona Sampson for the past fourteen years. It is also the title of Sampson’s latest collection, a powerful, brooding portrait of a landscape both real and imagined.
The collection represents a departure from Sampson’s earlier work, particularly the rhyme and harmonies of Common Prayer and Rough Music, although familiar themes of loss and belonging, myth and spirit, and the limitations of the senses are present here. Sampson’s interest in the philosophy of language, ontology and the relationship between music and poetry is also apparent.
Despite the beauty of the limestone countryside surrounding the village, it is evident from the outset that something is shading the poet’s vision. The baleful prologue, quoting from ‘Le Mort Joyeux’ Baudelaire’s wish to dig his own grave in lush, snail-rich soil, and the reference in ‘Prelude’ to ‘occlusion’ by ‘the unseen thumb’ […] ‘familiar / as the neighbour / I call fear’, introduce the collection’s disquieting psychogeography. Notwithstanding the stirring intimacy of place constructed through the painterly beauty and music of Sampson’s poetic vision, Coleshill’s roots are buried in dark soil. Coleshill may be both ‘a parish of sun / and shade’, but it is the shade that dominates this collection. The ‘Little Virgils’ of the collection’s opening poem, ‘speaking their new / night voices / and they see me, oh they see me,’ present a landscape populated by signals of death, loss and fear.
As with Sampson’s earlier work, there is a musicality to this collection, with emphasis on aural effects in poems like ‘The Changes’, ‘Dreamsongs’, ‘Hymn of the Coleshill Orchards’, and the two sequences, ‘Night Music’ and ‘Songs for Poll’s Bees’. In the latter this works particularly well, capturing the rhythms of nature and what it is to exist in the language of nature (in Heidegger’s sense of language itself as a signifier of being or existence) with a dazzling clarity; remaking that language again and again in the moment:
If he could be glimpsed in the pattern
of limitless addition –
but were not that pattern
[…]
for a moment you might have imagined,
a gift of pure grace
from a Perfection that is bodiless
here and everywhere
This poem is one of many in the collection to include religious references, which can at times lead to feelings of heaviness and obscurity. These allusions are most effective when they confront directly the slippage between the self and the moment, when the ambiguity of physical and emotional landscapes echoes the multiplicity of the self. In ‘The Art of Fugue’, Sampson writes:
I miss that girl
crossing the Green
in heels and feather trim,
whom I so nearly
and never was.
Oh, waking
is a rising to light,
something humming
deep and dirty
moves through a suspended life
Sampson’s incisive eye and linguistic fluidity are most apparent in the fourteen sonnets that form the bedrock of Coleshill, offering a framework for her engagement with uncertain themes. The sonnets demonstrate Sampson’s technical subtlety and attention to effects of atmosphere and light:
Downhill… and I met myself,
a pale ghost glimmering
the way a poacher’s torch shines
there – now there – between the trees
so it seems at moments as if
they too are ghosts, walking
in a new light, coming
out of memory towards you….
(‘Sonnet Seven – The Revenant’)
It seems that whilst she was working on Coleshill, Sampson’s perspective was coloured by the difficult circumstances surrounding her resignation as editor of Poetry Review. While the seasonal rhythms and powerful presence of history evoked by Sampson’s polished observations offer some sense of peace, it is not enough to balance her dark, uncompromising vision of a dreamscape that is ultimately a deathscape. The ‘Little Songs of Malediction’ that punctuate the collection underscore these repetitions and patterns of nature, reflecting both the constant recurrence of death, and our own insignificance against the natural cycle.
Nowhere is this suggested more strongly than in ‘The Death Threat’, which brilliantly encapsulates the collection’s overriding expression of death and dislocation from inner and outer landscapes:
He changes shape. The
autumn nights
permit this, with their mint of smells,
the ash-and-damp notes of a dream
you remember, blurred as wings
flurrying into a windscreen:
huge eyes, blackened by the lights,
because sometimes he’s an owl. Or he’s a swan,
or Caucasian male, clean-shaven, age unknown –
or this plumed and gleaming angel
at the door, with a knife.
While Sampson’s technical virtuosity is unquestionable, the very power and intensity of her voice through the collection can feel oppressive and absolute. I would like to have seen more of the promise of spring hinted at in ‘Coleshill Resurrection’ and ‘The Soloist’, to offset the indefatigable darkness.
QUOTE:
This book confirms 2 things; Fiona’s status as an expert on musicality and poetry and her ability to break up any subject, making it accessible. I would heartily recommend this book as essential reading to anyone, even remotely interested in poetry. This is much more than a simple text book.
Lyric Cousins, Poetry and Musical Form by Fiona Sampson, A Book Review
Home » Lyric Cousins, Poetry and Musical Form by Fiona Sampson, A Book Review
Lyric Cousins, Poetry and Musical Form by Fiona Sampson, A Book Review
By Katherine Lockton Posted March 30, 2018 In Poetry
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The hardback copy of this fine book is beautiful; the cover image depicting 3 women, stunning. I am a little scared of the book when I receive it as it has been a while since I read any academic writing, but my fears soon disappear when I
open the book. Its introduction is warm, friendly and accessible, both telling you what it is and what it isn’t.
She is, for instance not “claiming to write as a historian” but “thinking only fromthe narrow, particular ground” of her own experience. Her unique life experience as a former musician and a much-celebrated poet mean that Fiona is the perfect person to write such a book.
As a teacher of poetry and poet myself, I find the book a fascinating read. I particular I find her exploration of what verse and music are very intriguing and explained clearly and succinctly, while not being dumbed down:
“The phrase my husband whistles while he does the washing up is music. When
his five-year-old sings a nursery rhyme with half the words and much of the tune
missing, we recognize this, too as music; and indeed as verse.”
The above writing extract epitomizes the book’s approach to the subject of poetry and musical form. It is written using examples that are clear and cut to the point Fiona is making so that there is no doubt as to what she is saying. This
book is perfectly written for everyone from university students, academics to poets wanting to refine their writing. Fiona uses a limited number of examples, going back to them again and again, not because she lacks the examples to back up her work, but because this book is meant as a teaching aid and this is the best way to teach anyone.
There is a lot to love about this book, in particular, her discussion on the different way we take in various art forms, a painting being taken in in one go as opposed to a piece of music, with a clear beginning and ending, and a clear
chronology.
This book confirms 2 things; Fiona’s status as an expert on musicality and poetry and her ability to break up any subject, making it accessible. I would heartily recommend this book as essential reading to anyone, even remotely interested in poetry. This is much more than a simple text book.
The paperback edition is now available to order, priced at a very reasonable £21.19 from Amazon.
Katherine Lockton
QUOTE:
fusion of modernist and lyric.
highlights the music of her voice.
one of Sampson's themes is how limited language is, and this book belongs to the art of hint. The tone is controlled and lightly pitched;
Rough Music by Fiona Sampson
Smooth surfaces and dark themes make for a fascinating collection, says Ruth Padel
Ruth Padel
Fri 27 Aug 2010 19.05 EDT First published on Fri 27 Aug 2010 19.05 EDT
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The creative tug-of-war in British poetry between experimental freedom and the ancient delights of ballad and song, where lyrics cohere with end-rhyme, is very old. You might date the open conflict to 1602, when the poet and songwriter Thomas Campion attacked "the unaptnesse of Rime in poesie". Other poets furiously defended rhyme; Milton came in for Campion, saying rhyme acted on poets as "a constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse, than else they would have exprest them". The battle, still very much alive, does not merely spark arguments between poets; it generates important tensions within poets, even within poems. In 2005, when Fiona Sampson became editor of Britain's central poetry magazine Poetry Review, she made it a place where both impulses could flourish, and the same spirit of electric opposites cohabitating animates her own new collection, which has been shortlisted for the Forward prize. Rough Music, it seems, is the fusion of modernist and lyric.
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Sampson has a PhD in philosophy of language, won the Newdigate prize for poetry at Oxford (as did Matthew Arnold, Oscar Wilde, Andrew Motion and Jane Griffiths) and is a founding editor of a journal of east European writing, so there's bags of intellect. But she was once a professional violinist, and this collection highlights the music of her voice. "What we hope for / is a time to come / when we'll look back on these afternoons / coined with leafshadow and rain / as if to a beautiful exception", says her poem "Envoi", extending the vowel-music of "come", "afternoons", "coined" and "rain", interwoven with Fs, through to the unexpectedly long, self-referential climax of "beautiful exception".
"Rough music" is apparently an old name for the scapegoating portrayed in Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge. The townspeople, accompanied by jingly hobbyhorse music, parade effigies of two outed ex-lovers; the adulterous woman, now married to someone else, expires from shock. She thought her past was safe. But no past is safe from poetry, and the stakes behind Rough Music are high. Is the persona presented by a poem a mocking effigy, a mask? Music has power to hurt as well as to soothe. "I brought her home / I bring them all home / the bruised, the crushed, / defaced, deflowered / Fruits of love / from the black river."
The "roughness" under the poems' silken surface is the underworld: rape, loss, danger in hidden depths. Orpheus, Eurydice and Hades are re-voiced in terms of drugs and the adolescent knack for disaster. "The girl goes looking for danger / . . . the boy won't let it go." The poem "Deep Water" addresses someone having a cancer scan while outside the "worst floods in modern British history" keep rising. "The spine / drops its hook into the dark / of the scan / at the Cobalt Unit . . . / When the radiologist counted down you thought I'm flying – / your rick-rack bones opened into pinions / every joint ratcheting out / to wing-tips that floated on streaming black / while the same blackness streamed / between your ribs."
But one of Sampson's themes is how limited language is, and this book belongs to the art of hint. The tone is controlled and lightly pitched; there is a lovely surface smoothness with the rough, as in "Skater", where a lone "you" skates under the moon like a migrating bird, and "The line behind you brightens / with crystal, then darkens / as you draw it out".
Ruth Padel is chair of judges for this year's Forward prizes.
QUOTE:
"Rough Music" denotes the mayhem of carnival, but this collection invites us to take plenty of smooth with the rough.
Sampson's mysteries and epiphanies are powerful because they register not only in the macrocosm of metaphor, but in the microsphere of form.
Of Mutability, By Jo Shapcott
Rough Music, By Fiona Sampson
By Carol Rumens
Friday 20 August 2010 00:00
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The Independent Culture
Both these new poetry collections demonstrate their authors' interest in the genre that involves writing about other art-forms, ekphrasis. For Jo Shapcott, the work of the late avant-garde artist, Helen Chadwick, provides inspiration. The title's direct reference is not to Spenser's envoi to The Faerie Queene but to Chadwick's 1986 ICA exhibition, "Of Mutability".
Chadwick's technique often involved mixing organic and inorganic material, and the poems negotiate metaphorical equivalents. Some borrow the artist's titles, but their aim is dramatic rather than descriptive. "Viral Landscape," in which Chadwick superimposed magnified photos of her own cells onto photographed landscapes, enables Shapcott to cross into a much-loved pastoral scene and introduce the mutable entity of her own body: "The trees around the perimeter/ were a block of solid colour,/ (my stomach fluttered at the sight – and/ gut epithelium is five days old at most)".
How to keep the autobiographical self under control but within touching distance seems to be the underlying challenge. Bodily sensations may assert themselves in the form of aching hips and itching skin, but "Don't trouble... to head anywhere but the sky" concludes the title sonnet. Looking down, you might "see your feet/ mistrust the pavement and your blood tests/ turn the doctor's expression grave". The poems translate breast cancer's mutations and terrors into fruitful and humorous accumulations of paradox, play-science and metamorphosis. Beyond the bodily disarray, the climate may cave in ("Composition") but the earth also offers refuge.
There are glassy solids: a jade marble, London's "Gherkin". At the end of "Somewhat Unravelled", an artfully constructed dialogue between the poet and a confused elderly relative, the speaker is invited to "rootle in the earth outside my front window,/ set yourself in the special bed, the one only/ wasname is allowed to garden...". Focused on process and becoming, Of Mutability is an inventive series of strategies for tuning chaos into counterpoint, flight into the arts of fugue.
Like Shapcott, Fiona Sampson is acutely conscious of the physical self through space and time. "Hayfever Portrait" might be at home in Of Mutability – which is not to suggest an influence, but a zeitgeist. Once, poetry's radical new mode was confessionalism and, for women poets, the politically significant foregrounding of their own stories. Now the search is on for meta-narratives.
Sampson, however, is interested in definition rather than metaphorical ramification. Her enabling art, music, is more mutable than any. It slips away in time, as we do, but she knows how to translate its devices into language. Rhythm is essential, and she is an artist of line and stanza-break. Post-modernist techniques need not preclude the uses of expectation, and Sampson finds new subtleties in rhyme. There's the hide-and-seek of "Charivari", the Dickinsonian pointedness of "From the Adultress's Songbook".
"Rough Music" denotes the mayhem of carnival, but this collection invites us to take plenty of smooth with the rough. The title-poem works like recitative, and records a conversation between Orpheus, Euridice and Hades. The young lovers are brilliantly punkish figures, Orpheus "a smack-head guitar dreamer" and Euridice, the eternal "lost girl" preferring suicide to fixed identity. Menotti's operatic Christmas classic, Amahl and the Night Visitors, and Schubert's great Quintet in C major, D. 956, also provoke potent writing.
Although the fine sequence "Schubertiad" is the only poem directly concerned with this composer, the liminal quality of his music seems echoed in much of Sampson's writing. She, too, executes swift and surprising modulations, and possesses the knack of combining pizzicato and melodic effects. Sampson's mysteries and epiphanies are powerful because they register not only in the macrocosm of metaphor, but in the microsphere of form.
Carol Rumens's 'De Chirico's Threads' is published by Seren