Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Fiona Sampson’s poems begin in the middle of a thought, as if an ongoing event has suddenly broken into words - ‘But summer light’… “If it’s what you want I’ll do it…” “None of it matters, of course…” And sometimes the sentence can go on without stopping till the poem ends without finishing. It is after all how we experience living: more middles than beginnings and endings. But there are endings we fear. ‘By Your Self’ is in the middle of waiting for a scan:

                                ...the scan may not show
any fat white patches, doodles on your soft
                                                precious lights
and liver, you may be going to live for ever or
if not for ever for now which is the same
                                                thing, it’s life
it’s now, stretching out again, it’s a place in
                                                   the rigging
it’s your own story and not the one in the
                                                      mirror it’s

And there the poem ends. These eternal nows are the regular occasions of the poems.

And in the park their kids kicking a ball

each foot landing right, while overhead
the punctual planes come safely in, rain falls
in punctuating well-anticipated showers and
                                                  everything
is natural without end right to the end.

The play on “punctual” and “punctuating” is part of her general alertness to words, allowing them to point off in other directions - “people with lives that are legal and tender”. These flourishes, like her skilful, convincing use of rhyme, fit easily into her Donneish colloquialism: “It doesn’t matter what I say or do, / You don’t love me. That’s the end of it”.

     There’s an uncertainty about the reality of reality. In ‘Folding the Real’ she implicitly refers to Hopkins’s remark that he always drinks at one tankard, the tankard of self: “The voice - that print of self - which is already in/ the unmade sound, which is in the ear or comes up to meet / the sound you make…”. How much is out there, she’s asking, and how much in here? Wisely she doesn’t philosophise, though philosophically trained; but the mystery of consciousness is at the heart of these poems, looking for “what is”, which is also oneself: “the print of self: that is, of what is”. Which is also the other. She’s waiting for this dream to pass.

     “We are so far into the nowhere already…”. This is the nowhere of love that lovers “already live in, breathe in and out of”. It’s the imaginative recreation of actual experience - therefore poetry not philosophy, but the poetry of a thinker, a considerable poet of metaphysical and earthy passion, now in her maturity. “What you want to do is stop the shouting, make love/ and peace and just get wise to everything…” but each blade of grass, each plate “indulges in an obfuscatory post-coital smoke”.