T.S. Eliot Prize shortlisted
Includes the Forward Single Poem Prize shortlisted ‘On Trumpeldor Beach’
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.
‘Urgent, acrobatically alert poems alternate with the comparative stillness of a series of love sonnets. Here, too, the imagination is always at work, demonstrating that curiosity is a form of passion.’
Sean O’Brien, The Sunday Times
‘That she is also a very fine poet indeed seems almost impertinent of her, but that is what she is… Sampson’s free verse soon surprises by its seductive ease and its vivid rendition of he ordinary, material world. This perfect equilibrium between the numinous and the touchable is typical of Sampson’s achievement.’
Adam Thorpe, the Guardian
‘Fiona Sampson burst onto the literary landscape as the brilliant young editor of Poetry Review a couple of years ago. In Common Prayer, her subject is darkness of many kinds, erotic or lonely, histories of Eastern Europe, abandonment. She finds a subtle suggestion of sexual gesture in unexpected places.’
Elaine Feinstein, The Times
‘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