Common Prayer

Description

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.

Fiona Sampson has published six books and her work has been translated into Romanian, Serbian, Hebrew, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Finnish, Slovakian and Catalan. Her poetry collections include Picasso's Men (Phoenix Press, 1994), Folding the Real (Seren 2001), Hotel Casino: chapbook (Ark Publications, 2004)and The Distance Between Us: a verse-novel (Seren, 2005). After a brief solo career as a violinist, Sampson pioneered writing in health care in the UK, and now researches and consults internationally in this field. She has a PhD in the philosophy of writing process (University of Nijmegen, 2001) and is AHRB Research Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts at Oxford Brookes University and Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Sussex. She is currently the editor of Poetry Review.

'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