Fiona Sampson burst on to the literary landscape as the brilliant young editor of Poetry Review a couple of years ago. She had already published 14 books of her own, including essays as well as poetry. 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: 'Darkness opens like a gate again; my fingers on your latch'.

In the clatter of the Underground, a city poet’s Underworld, she names stations like 'wayside shrines / on your journey in the dark' insisting on the solidity of presences that 'ground / what flickers in you'.

Once a musician herself, Sampson’s poems sometimes use the music of 20th-century Modernism, here altogether faithful to the natural rhythms of speech. Some of the poems ripple like 'a handful of stones against glass', as she calls up Messaien’s piano. Yet she can handle closed forms. I was particularly drawn to several 14-line lyrics, which spell out the human need for love.