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.
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?
Fiona Sampson’s second full length book of poems is as varied and well crafted as any that will be published this year. Her intellect and humanity are underlain by a compelling poetic talent. Surviving a murder attempt generates the clarity, compression and pure celebratory drive of the book’s title sequence of fourteen syllabic sonnets.
