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Common Prayer

Fiona Sampson

Common Prayer by Fiona Sampson
Categories: 21st Century, Women
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (96 pages)
(Pub. Jun 2007)
9781857549423
Out of Stock
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  • 'Sampson's flawless ear comes first; the imagery comes second. But when the imagery does come...it delivers an ecstatic hit.'

                          Poetry London
    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.
    Fiona Sampson has been published in more than thirty languages.  She has twelve books in translation, and has received the Zlaten Prsten (Macedonia) and the Charles Angoff Award (US), and been shortlisted for the Evelyn Encelot Prize for European Women Poets.  From 2005-2012 she was the Editor of Poetry Review ; ... read more
    Awards won by Fiona Sampson Short-listed, 2010 Fiona Sampson shortlisted amongst 10 others for the TS Eliot poetry prize.  (Rough Music)
    '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
    '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
    '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
    Praise for Fiona Sampson 'It's always been the great distinction - and the great opportunity - of Poetry Review to be at once a beacon and a lighthouse: as interested in providing a centre for good writing, as it is in estabishing and representing a wide curiosity about the many forms that good writing might take. It's especially heartening to see the magazine in such excellent health in this, its centenary year.'
    Andrew Motion
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