By turns sensual and incantatory, "Common Prayer" offers a liturgy for a world in crisis. Meditations on the actuality of sickness and bereavement move outward through narratives of the broken body of Europe's violent twentieth century. Challenging and exploratory, Fiona Sampson's poetry remakes the spiritual and physical metaphors by which we live.
About the Author
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. From 2005-2012 she was the "Editor of Poetry Review"; she is now Professor of Poetry at the University of Roehampton, where she is the Director of the Roehampton Poetry Centre and Editor of Poem. 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, her publications include twenty-four volumes of poetry, criticism and philosophy of language. She has received the Newdigate Prize, a Cholmondeley award, a Hawthornden fellowship, Kathleen Blundell and Oppenheimer-John Downes Awards from the Society of Authors, Writer's Awards from the Arts Councils of England and Wales and various Poetry Book Society commendations, and has been shortlisted twice for both the T. S. Eliot Prize and Forward prizes. Recent books include a new edition of Percy Bysshe Shelley for Faber (PBS Book-club Choice) and Coleshill (Chatto, PBS Recommendation). The US edition of her selected poems appeared from Sheep Meadow Press in 2013.
Reviews
Awards won by Fiona Sampson
Short-listed, 2010 Fiona Sampson shortlisted amongst 10 others for the TS Eliot poetry prize (Rough Music)
"In her finest collection yet, Common Prayer confirms Sampson's many gifts: sensual, sharply intelligent, searching; these poems live on their own terms, in their own appointed ground, ready to experiment, but not simply for experiment's sake, deeply musical, intellectually engaged and, most importantly, in love, not only with language, but also with the world that we seek day by day, through denotation, and through song" – John Burnside
"Fiona Sampson makes no apology for her old-fashioned diction of baptism, martyr, angel, avoiding the usual big questions by asking apparently ingenuous ones – is that radiance? Are you glass? There is a breathless agony in the isolated speaking voice which demands patient re-reading to be relished" – Medbh McGuckian
"I am amazed at Fiona Sampson's ability to be metaphysical and visceral at once – to be savagely tender even, at times. Her image-making is entirely original, as is her diction; and she can elevate the ordinary, and settle the elevated" – John Kinsella
