Fiona Sampson is a writer and poet who has published twenty-seven books and been translated into thirty-seven languages. She’s been made a Member of the Order of the British Empire for Services to Literature and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Fellow of the English Association and Fellow of the Wordsworth Trust. She is the Professor of Poetry at Roehampton University; and also a critic, librettist and editor. Prizes include the Newdigate Prize, Cholmondeley Award,Hawthornden Fellowship, and various honours from Arts Council England, Arts Council Wales, the Society of Authors, the Poetry Book Society and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and international awards in the US, India, Macedonia and Bosnia. She’s also held a number of international fellowships. Her biography, In Search of Mary Shelley (2018), has been internationally critically acclaimed and shortlisted for the Biographers Club Slightly Foxed Prize. Her forthcoming poetry collection is Come Down (Little, Brown, 2020).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiona_Sampson
DANTE’S CAVE
VelikeDoline, Skocjan
Finally I came
to the end of the world
to a limestone cliff
falling in pale steps
and far below a pool
somehow out of myth
proving that there
was nothing but the rock
to hold me up to raise me
into that clear air
where crows were looping where the eye
of God was gold
and inattentive then
I saw the end is air
and falling it is clean
and lovely it is blue.
DEAF
Are you listening you are
listening to the world
you think but you hear yourself
over and over the dark tongue
of world its hidden places
under trees beyond the lights
darkness falling from your feet
so deep you could fall through it
forever and how loud world
is with night in the trees
like a roost of parakeets rising
the dark tongue of world
rising up through you as you
fall dear self dear
lonely self falling silently
mouthing through sound
WILD EQUINOX
These days are still
cold the line of feeling
working its way thinly
up as we might touch
a pulse almost to life
or make the heart inside
an egg echo itself or
hear ants under the trees
raising secret cities
*
What you pray for
hardly seems
to matter when
the valley holds
light with such
care any-
way is this
so fragile this –
truth is it
or something like it –
here but also
somehow not
it waits behind
all this for
its turn to speak
through each tree
and fence post –
and since you’re here
also to speak
through you
*
There are still
verticals
and the trees
clamber uphill
again this morning
to labour is
to prayeven
when the clenched buds
of the pear tree
cannot help
themselves the valley
plunges on
miming morning –
Confucians say
observance is
all there is –
and when we show
our hands are empty
something seems
to disappear some
light be lost
between the trees
*
Dry season
in the heart
you have to pray
although you can’t
but still the valves
of the magnolia
wrench
themselves upward
*
Unignorably
the ghost tree pours
upward raising
and raising itself
wild ducks fly
downstream
with lifted voices
and the white
flowers crowd
out of branches
that are holding
dark air up
everything is
and knows it is –
wild equinox
balancing light
with the
inseparabledark
LADY OF THE SEA
I
Blue and black
the Virgin sits
in her high
palanquin
she does not
regard us her
regard is drawn
back from us
far back
among the centuries
where she comes
from and where
she is going
already
she is travelling
past us and away
ancient star
flying so slowly
we do not
see her move
II
suppose she
compassionate
uncoiled her serpent’s
arms or let
that black mask
fall could she
move among us
then or what
would be broken
and fired again
what understanding
newly perfected
III
high and far
very high
and far like
the disappearing
note of wind
shrilling between
glass comes
the tone the sweet
stone rings
when you knock
the saint’s open
sarcophagus
IV
Lady in your
ark of rock
you who wear
the white rock
as a wedding
gown Lady
adamant
and personal
we carry you
in the eye’s
reliquary
like a mote
or like a beam
that drowning we
could cling to –
Lady stronger
than time stronger than
light we see you
invisible
and everywhere
MARCH LAPWINGS
Now everything
begins to move
and everything stays
where it is
each ash tree
and each hummock
shifts against
itself even
the grass shifts
and the electric
lapwings cry
change change
because the common
melts and flows
even the earth
flows like thawing
ice how lost
the senses are
in this disturbance
here it comes
again the new
electric cry
change change
as it moves past us
FRANKENSTEIN’S GOLEM
Who is this
moving swiftly
through darkness
in a landscape
not yet given
form by daylight
slipping shapeless
as a shadow
through the dark
and unknown places
wearing night
next to his skin
wearing a pelt
of pine and stone
who is this
atoms seething
on his skin
who passes
through the dark
where he was buried
and from which
he was lifted
not by love
by power alone
lifted from death
and forced to pass
again through his own
dying who
slips away
between rocks (as
waterfalls
electrify
the dark) who is this
on the mountain
where morning s
break along rocks
orange pink
terracotta
light new
and tenderly wrought?
NOUMENON
Snow falls and fills a valley
and under its white roof
a sleeper dreams snow is falling
secretly for her alone
on and on in darkness
it falls like something speaking
noiselessly into silence
something that’s all alone
in silence can’t hear
itself can’t feel grass or stones
or the small branches it conceals
even in the sleeper’s dreams
falling snow cannot feel
the world it longs to touch
and misses falling through its own
cold embrace on and on
in the dark the sleeper dreams
snow is falling on her pillow
as wide wet words the night
speaks about itself snow
speaking the words for night
SONG OF THOSE WHO ARE TO COME
We who are to come
to whom you owe this field
these trees this changing sky
to whom you owe these walls
that have comforted you
that will comfort us
because you made them
to be a shelter for us
although we need no shelter
having the field the trees
the changing sky to move
around us in their great
circuit we who come
out of that time when all
changing things will have their rest
we bless you
our parents wandering
the valley as if you
have just arrived as if
you understand nothing.
ARCADES
In the morning air
voices fill and empty
beside the barn under
the walnut trees
one continual linked pouring
the way arcades go
linking and pouring linked
and poured their speech is one
continual discourse
raising hands to gesture
speaking on and on
in the shade under
the cypress trees 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.
DAILY BREAD
Sometimes it’s just the daily bread
of thought just the visible
being itself (a cup of coffee
carried to a window seat
where varnished woodwork shines
in the morning light) sometimes
small things reveal to you
how you’re alive and how you live
sometimes there’s no remission
no trumpet no voice of God
in Levantine splendour only
this blur of steam like a breath
and 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.
DROWNED MAN
See how they sleep first he turns
away and then she turns
after him or now she turns
her back and he follows
rolled by an imperative
deeper than sleep
he rolls over like a wave
that turns itself over
sleepily with the sea’s deep
breathing with its rhythm
pulsing far out from land pulsing far
down in the dark
where creatures not yet formed are forming
where like half-made beasts
his dreams swim among hers where
she hears his breathing far
above her nearer to the light
nearer to the white-topped
waves the white-peaked sheets his arm
is thrown across her now
as she floats upward drawing him
out of deep tides crossing
their legs once more as morning lies
motionless to the horizon.
BEAR, DANCING
What is bear and what
is the dancing man
inside the bear skin what sweat
and what stink of tallow
hang between the man
and the old skin he wears
inside which the man dies
as bear is reborn
why does man put on
bear why raise him
again from darkness raise doubt
out of the dark
and who dances whom
when like a hand
dipped in a wound the fear
is danced over and over?
AVENUE
You wake and find yourself
dreaming you walk
an avenue of trees
whose canopies
stir with the vagueness of dream
it seems
as though the time to come
must be a wind
stirring the leaves coming
from far away
in the west where a coast
shimmers vaguely
with surf shimmering like leaves
their white froth
spends itself
unimportantly
all this is very far
away
and you are very small
the air is deep
and you are far down in its valley
walking
the pale dust path walking
against the wind.
TWO NIGHTS (SONNETS)
i.
On summer evenings
air thickens – and settles,
dust dropping onto shelves of books
silently – settles.
These evenings
lift from the pages of books,
or out of dreams.
Write your name in the dust
that blooms on a polished table,
fleet wild pollen.
Dusk’s a wide, blue table
and we’re numberless as the settling dust –
little souls, barbed like pollen
with selfish, unassuageable dreams.
ii
The early dark thrums with wings,
shadows scud between headlights.
A window at the road’s end gleams
like a gaze: too long, misplaced.
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 his knife.
HAWTHORN MILK
Thorn-lily runs beside the fields
to meet the sky
where the smell of rain-water and salt
is like an opening;
chalice or drain, its mouth soft
and wet –
This smell is meat,
not hawthorn –
the animal that turns and turns nearby
is not the sea
You were a breast
where I drank rusty milk
that made me yours
The rust peeled from your hands
and stained my skin
like ochre, like blood
When you died
my skin turned black
When we danced the macabre
your skin turned white
as the flowers of a Northern spring,
and I was your milk hope
The taste of blood in milk
is like rust The smell of death
is like hawthorn blossom
Hawthorn stars the sky,
black against daylight
Its odour
is close and creaturely at night
How is it drugs
can give the skin
this deathly perfume
of hawthorn?
Familiar dark head
crowned with bright hawthorn –
your fear
is so lightly, so darkly worn
