Reading Fiona Sampson

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This book-length study of an eminent, distinguished and influential poet and contemporary woman of letters integrates analysis and a honed interpretation of the near-total gamut of the oeuvre to-date of Professor Fiona Sampson. The study includes biographical insight and synthesizes its rigorous discussions of the dominant rubric of Professor Sampson's poetic métier, her prose in different genres, and the literary practices of over a decades-long and much-lauded literary career. This critical work finds and displays incisive and fruitful ways by which the oeuvre in question crosses boundaries in literary writing and practices with fertile results and evidences those cross-currents in a manner that indicates the trajectory of a sensibility or structure of feeling, one which though highly intelligent and self-aware is also deeply empathic. The idiosyncrasy of this study comes about by the ways in which a formidable consideration of Sampson's other roles as editor, translator, healer, educator, critic, and biographer in the world of letters can be understood as complementary parts of her predominant, first, poetic métier. In this sense, the book itself has a poetic function though written in clear discursive prose. Its aim is to see and make its readership see how all of Professor Sampson's flourishing roles in the literary world grow out of and into her primary role as a creative writer. The study finds felicitous and innovative ways of showing how the work of an editor, a critic or theorist might be fruitfully seen as vehicles for the major poetic tenor. Thus, the central critical trope of this study shows how and why the variegated oeuvre to date is organically rooted in and connected into and out of one thoroughgoing literary intelligence and vision. All the readings and chapters cohere in a way to display the oneness of the oeuvre and career but, more pressingly, to show the readership how such oneness might be usefully understood. A lucid, coherent and compelling reading of Sampson's main works makes this book a scintillating study and a much needed contribution to the current work being done on major contemporary poets and writers and, in particular, contemporary women figures, in the British and international literary scenes.