Come Down

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WINNER OF THE WALES POETRY BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2021 Winner of the Naim Frasheri Laureateship of Albania and Macedonia Winner of the European Lyric Atlas Prize 'Fiona Sampson's voice is something new and it's a delight to hear it . . . A joy to read' W. S. Merwin Questions of humanity, of point of view, are at the heart of Fiona Sampson's new collection, Come Down. Throughout, Sampson's 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.

Professor Fiona Sampson MBE FRSL is a leading British poet published in thirty-eight languages. Come Down (2020) was awarded the Naim Frasheri Laureateship, the European Lyric Atlas Prize and Wales Poetry Book of the Year. A biographer and critic, librettist and literary translator, her In Search of Mary Shelley was internationally acclaimed, and Two-Way Mirror: The life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (2021) was a New York Times Editors' Choice and Washington Post Book of the Year, a Sunday Times Paperback of the Year, and finalist for the Plutarch Prize and the PEN Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography.

Fiona Sampson's voice is something new and it's a delight to hear it . . . A joy to read Numinous musicality remains a hallmark of Fiona Sampson's poetry. Come Down traces the meeting points of our fleeting human lives and the shifting timelessness of the world that surrounds us - Guardian A very fine poet indeed . . . This perfect equilibrium between the numinous and the touchable is typical of Sampson's achievement - Guardian The imagination is always at workk; demonstrating that curiosity is a form of passion - The Sunday Times 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 Sensual, sharply intelligent, searching; these poems live on their own terms, in their own appointed ground . . . deeply musical, intellectually engaged and, most importantly, in love, not only with language, but also with the world we seek day by day The most generous thing the poet can do is to give us vivid, piercing memories that become our experience . . . Here, dangerously and marvellously, [Fiona Sampson] comes close to revealing herself as a symbol The passion surfaces in an elegiac, metaphysical flux . . . [Fiona Sampson] takes things apart, deconstructs them to set free the music inside