Fiona Sampson

Limestone Country is a perceptive lyrical evocation and investigation into four landscapes in Europe and beyond Seemingly disparate these places are bound together by their limestone geology by personal experience and Fiona Sampson s unique imagination

WINNER OF THE WALES POETRY BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2021Winner of the Naim Frasheri Laureateship of Albania and Macedonia Winner of the European Lyric Atlas Prize Fiona Sampsons voice is something new and its a delight to hear it . . . A joy to read W. S. MerwinQuestions of humanity, of point of view, are at the heart of Fiona Sampsons new collection, Come Down.Throughout, Sampsons poems shimmer between the human perspective and what is beyond - some larger, longer-term consciousness. Language runs and dances over the stuff of the human body and the material of the landscape. And yet, despite these radical perspective shifts, the collection keeps in sight, always, the human experience: the act of creation; the way in which childhood memory and family lore impinge on the present. Come Down ends with a long, eponymous poem, which moves fluidly and brilliantly through different forms of memory.

A nourishing, occasionally provoking hybrid of group biography, cultural criticism and travelogue that seeks to restore to Romanticism its radicalism, and also show just how much the countryside shaped its manifesto Hephzibah Anderson, Mail on Sunday"Romanticism isnt a cultural artefact," [Sampson] writes. "Its a way for thought to move." She is taking her own mind for a walk and [...] the essence is intellectual and fully freighted. The cast list is long and international and the method shifting, subtle and demanding Adam Nicolson, GuardianFor the Romantics, the countryside was a place of radical change. But those real life experiences have been overlaid by two centuries of cliche. To rediscover - and learn from - their radicalism we need to find a fresh approach.In this extraordinary hybrid of scholarship, biography, cultural history, travelogue and lifewriting, acclaimed poet and Romantic biographer Fiona Sampson does just that. As she walks the British countryside, from the Isle of Wight to Kintyre, her evocative and thought-provoking book helps us see clearly whats hiding in plain sight.

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to the most important poets in our literature.Music, when soft voices die, Vibrates in the memory -- Odours, when sweet violets sicken, Live within the sense they quicken. -- To

Deep in limestone country, at the corner of Wiltshire, Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire, lies the village of Coleshill.This haunting new collection from Fiona Sampson is a portrait of place, both real and imaginary; a dreamscape with its roots deep in the local soil.The poems hum with an evocative music of their own: there are hymns of the orchards, verses for walkers, songs for bees. These are slices of life and states of mind; poems of grief, fears and maledictions, but also of renewal, resurrections and the promise of spring.Coleshill emerges as a parish of sun / and shade; its darkness and light perfectly balanced. From the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prize shortlisted poet comes a deep, interrogative collection of astonishing clarity and power.

Mary Shelley (1797-1851) fue criada por su padre, el escritor William Godwin, en un hogar frecuentado por los poetas, pensadores, filósofos y escritores radicales del momento. A los dieciséis años se fugo con el poeta romantico Percy Bysse Shelley, embarcandose en una relacion que la llevo de Inglaterra a Europa y a una existencia marcada por las deudas, la infidelidad de su marido y la muerte de sus tres primeros hijos, antes de quedar viuda a los veinticuatro años, cuando Shelley murio ahogado en Italia. Lo mas asombroso es que fue durante estos años de adolescencia y primera juventud cuando Mary escribio Frankenstein, novela canonica que ha creado dos de los arquetipos centrales de nuestra modernidad.Grabado en español iberico (España).

British poetry is enjoying a period of exceptional richness and variety. This is exciting but its also confusing, and throws up the need for an enthusiastic guide that can explain and celebrate the many parallel poetry projects now underway.Beyond the Lyric does just that. This is a book of enthusiasms: an intelligent and witty map of contemporary British poetry and a radical, accessible guide to living British poets, grouped for the first time according to the kind of poetry they write. In a series of groundbreaking new classifications, beginning with the bread-and-butter diction of the Plain Dealers and ending on the capacious generosity of the Exploded Lyric, it examines the broad range of contemporary tendencies from the baroque swagger of the Dandies to the restrained elegance of the Oxford Elegists; from the layered, haunting verse of Mythopoesis to the inventive explorations of the New Formalists. By probing the cultural context from which these groups emerge and shifting the critical focus back to the work itself, Sampsons astute analysis illuminates and demystifies each of these terms and asks the big questions about what makes a poem.The result is a celebration of poetry as a connected, responsive and above all communitarian form. Lively, engaging and inviting, this is the indispensible and authoritative guide for anyone whos ever wondered whats going on in British poetry today.

Sand seems as alive as if she had just walked out of the room...quietly witty... fascinatingThe TimesThought-provoking... written with energy, passion and commitment to its fascinating subjectLiterary ReviewMy friends will respect me, I hope, just as much under my jacket as under my dress... So take me for a man or a woman as you wish.By the age of thirty, the novelist who had been born Aurore Dupin in 1804 had become the internationally renowned George Sand. In English, her daring literary experiments were out-selling even Victor Hugo. But the legend of Sand herself scandalised Paris. Not only prodigiously talented but cigar-smoking, cross-dressing and promiscuous, she seemed to break all the rules society set for women.What can we learn from the way she lived? Was her iconoclasm simply an act of courage, a declaration of absolute autonomy? Or did her emotional and creative relationships with many of the leading figures of her day from Fryderyk Chopin to Gustave Flaubert, and Alfred de Musset to Eugene Delacroix form part of her dialogue with the world around her: a dialogue that is intrinsic to writing itself?In Becoming George, award-winning poet and biographer Fiona Sampson rehabilitates Sand as an intellectual and artistic giant, the beating heart of French literature in the nineteenth century. Too often underestimated in the century and a half since her death, she speaks to us today about ecology, politics, society, gender with brilliant prescience; a figure ahead of her time.Praise for Fiona Sampson:Fiona Sampson beautifully describes the self-invention of George Sand, the Romantic periods most famous woman writer, and in the process paints a vivid portrait of a world in the throes of political and artistic revolution. Maurice Samuels, Professor of French, Yale UniversityFiona Sampson is a sleuth of a biographer ... rarely has my jaw dropped on so many occasions while reading a biography. Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Daily Mail on In Search of Mary ShelleyBrilliant, heart-stopping ... reads like a thriller, a memoir and a provocative piece of literary fiction all at the same time ... magical and compelling. Charlotte Gordon, Washington Post on Two Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett BrowningIf we get another literary biography [this year] as astute and feelingful as this one, we shall be lucky. John Carey, The Sunday Times on In Search of Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley (1797-1851) fue criada por su padre, el escritor William Godwin, en un hogar frecuentado por los poetas, pensadores, filósofos y escritores radicales del momento. A los dieciséis años se fugo con el poeta romantico Percy Bysse Shelley, embarcandose en una relacion que la llevo de Inglaterra a Europa y a una existencia marcada por las deudas, la infidelidad de su marido y la muerte de sus tres primeros hijos, antes de quedar viuda a los veinticuatro años, cuando Shelley murio ahogado en Italia. Lo mas asombroso es que fue durante estos años de adolescencia y primera juventud cuando Mary escribio Frankenstein, novela canonica que ha creado dos de los arquetipos centrales de nuestra modernidad. Los datos de la vida de Mary Shelley son bien conocidos. Pero ¿quien fue la mujer que llevo esa vida? A su muerte nos lego multitud de escritos y documentos, lo que permite a la poeta Fiona Sampson revisar cartas, diarios y todo tipo de registros para entablar un dialogo fascinante con el pasado y exhumar para los lectores a la verdadera Mary Shelley. En este proceso descubre un personaje complejo y generoso -amiga, intelectual, madre y amante- que intenta ser fiel a su intensa vocacion literaria en una epoca en la que ser mujer y escritora era una anomalia. Mary Shelley fue una pionera en su campo, pero el precio que hubo de pagar fue extraordinario.

Fiona Sampsons latest collection transforms the sensory world into an astonishingly new and vivid poetry. Here, dream and myth, creatures real and imagined, and the sights and sounds of distance and of home all coalesce in a sustained meditation on time and belonging. Combining formal sophistication with metaphysical exploration, this is an incandescent work of renewal, beauty and risk.