Showing results by narrator "Fiona Sampson" in All Categories

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.

'How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,' Elizabeth Barrett Browning famously wrote, shortly before defying her family by running away to Italy with Robert Browning. But behind the romance of her extraordinary life stands a thoroughly modern figure, who remains an electrifying study in self-invention. This vividly written biography, the first full study for over thirty years, incorporates recent archival discoveries to reveal the woman herself.

Rough Music is the old English name for a custom of public scapegoating. This is a collection full of disturbing musical echoes, in which brilliant renewals of carol, charm, folksong, and ballad explore themes of violence, loss, and belonging. Fiona Sampson's characteristic lyric intensity deftly fuses metaphysics and politics with the vernacular of daily life.