Coleshill

An interrogative collection of astonishing power make up this haunting portrait of place, from the TS Eliot and Forward Prize shortlisted poet, Fiona Sampson

Coleshill finds Fiona Sampson enduring a term of trial, its rural setting made menacing by present threat, old terrors and the larger unravelling of the environment

In this sumptuous collection, haunted by fear and a surefooted, hard-won joy, Fiona Sampson celebrates that elusive and most endangered thing: a meaningful sense of place. Reading Coleshill, we are reminded of an essential community with the land, and with all our good neighbours, animals and humans

These poems of place, often troublingly dark, are sui generis in the way they use what's to hand to explore what's hidden. Fiona Sampson's technical subtlety is everywhere in evidence and her emotional range is startling. Coleshill is a book of rare power and depth.

This is Sampson's poetic masterpiece, and a landmark book. She creates intimacy of place through a chamber music of the natural and made worlds, honed observations and epiphanic ‘instrusions’. With its layering of history and presence, Coleshill is a major contribution to the literature of the local.

A richly rewarding and thematically coherent work, written with an avid attention to light effects, atmosphere, and the natural world.

A genuinely through-composed work, one poem opening secretly into another as the imagination endures a period of threat, when the reasonable assurances of ordinary civil life are removed by a sense that anything might happen, or that it already is happening. Given the material, the poet's touch is miraculously light.

Fiona Sampson is a poet, who has been shortlisted twice for the T.S. Eliot Prize and Forward Prizes. She has received a Cholmondeley Award, the Newdigate Prize, the Zlaten Prsten (Macedonia), Writer’s Awards from the Arts Councils of England and of Wales, and from the Society of Authors, and is a Fellow and Council Member of the Royal Society of Literature. She works as a critic and editor, and contributes regularly to the Guardian, Irish Times, Sunday Times, Independent and the Times Literary Supplement. In 2017 she was awarded an MBE for services to Literature and the Literary Community.

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.

Beyond the Lyric

As groundbreaking as F.R. Leavis's New Bearings in English Poetry, this critical “book of enthusiasms” maps the state of contemporary British poetry

Few are as well qualified to do this as Sampson… Sampson is a thorough and often persuasive close reader

This lovely, hopeful book is a celebration of the richness and variety in British Poetry right now

Vigorous and valuable...the best kind of guide: encouraging, enthusiastic, knowledgeable

This is an engaging, well-structured take on the poetry world, one that invites readers to read more, and to read carefully

British poetry is enjoying a period of exceptional richness and variety. This is exciting but it's 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, Sampson’s 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 who's ever wondered what's going on in British poetry today.

Fiona Sampson

Fiona Sampson’s 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.

Fiona Sampson

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