Fiona Sampson’s latest collection transforms the sensory world into an astonishingly new and vivid poetry. Here, dream and myth, creatures real and imagined, and the sights and sounds of ‘distance and of home’ all coalesce in a sustained meditation on time and belonging.
Combining formal sophistication with metaphysical exploration, this is an incandescent work of renewal, beauty and risk.
‘You go to Fiona Sampson for intensity, and The Catch doesn’t disappoint.’
Suzi Feay, Independent on Sunday
‘[Sampson] has an intense relationship with nature, communicated in delicate observations.’
Bel Mooney, Daily Mail
‘A complex economy of lived feeling… She can also render complexity of feeling with the economy that marks a poet of a high order… That rich plainness is enviable’
Sean O’Brien, Independent
‘Sampson’s verse feels alive.’
Leaf Arbuthnot, Times Literary Supplement
‘The Catch seems above all to be a narrative of mystical experience; free of God and dogma, but deeply aware of history and ecology, it may be among the pioneers of a newly emergent 21st-century incarnation of sacred poetry.’
Carol Rumens, Guardian