This brilliantly devised verse-novel opens with a love affair in crisis, unfolds through loss, risk and existential challenge, and ends with lovemaking in a domain at once sensual and imagined. Such radical ambiguity invites us to experience the lovers’ dilemmas as our own: is true intimacy only possible through distance? How much of our identity is just story?
Exploring the limits of meaning, Sampson refreshes our sense of poetry as that which goes beyond the grammar of the commonplace. Profoundly influenced by the poet’s work in the mainstream of European poetry, The Distance Between Us is a passionate exploration of psychology and sexuality set among the tensions of contemporary European identity.
‘Superb. Perfectly balancing remoter imaginative and intellectual perspectives with a richness of earthy, ordinary detail.’
Poetry Review
‘These poems are linguistic tours de force [which] point up the extraordinary versatility of Sampson’s language.’
Poetry London
In Translation: Bulgarian edition, Balkani, Sofia: 2009; Hebrew edition, Keshev, Tel Aviv: 2007; Albanian edition Poeteka, Tirana: 2006; Macedonian edition Magor, Skopje: 2005; Romanian edition Editura Parallela 45, Bucharest: 2005