The Catch

Crystalline poems of beauty and risk, from T.S. Eliot and Forward Prize shortlisted poet, Fiona Sampson

You go to Fiona Sampson for intensity, and The Catch doesn’t disappoint.

[Sampson] has an intense relationship with nature, communicated in delicate observations.

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

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

Full of originality and spirit, these poems are beautifully made and a joy to read

Fiona Sampson MBE FRSL is a leading British poet, writer, and Romanticist. Professor Emerita of Poetry at the University of Roehampton and Senior Research Fellow at Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford, she has received numerous national and international literary awards, and her work has been published in thirty-eight languages. 
 
 
Becoming George completes a trilogy of acclaimed biographies. In Search of Mary Shelley was an Observer, Independent, Financial Times, and Times Book of the Year. Two-Way Mirror was a Washington Post Book of the Year, a New York Times bestseller, and a finalist for the Plutarch Prize and the US PEN’s Jacqueline Bograd Weld International Award for Biography.

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.

Coleshill

An interrogative collection of astonishing power make up this haunting portrait of place, from the TS Eliot and Forward Prize shortlisted poet, Fiona Sampson

Coleshill finds Fiona Sampson enduring a term of trial, its rural setting made menacing by present threat, old terrors and the larger unravelling of the environment

In this sumptuous collection, haunted by fear and a surefooted, hard-won joy, Fiona Sampson celebrates that elusive and most endangered thing: a meaningful sense of place. Reading Coleshill, we are reminded of an essential community with the land, and with all our good neighbours, animals and humans

These poems of place, often troublingly dark, are sui generis in the way they use what's to hand to explore what's hidden. Fiona Sampson's technical subtlety is everywhere in evidence and her emotional range is startling. Coleshill is a book of rare power and depth.

This is Sampson's poetic masterpiece, and a landmark book. She creates intimacy of place through a chamber music of the natural and made worlds, honed observations and epiphanic ‘instrusions’. With its layering of history and presence, Coleshill is a major contribution to the literature of the local.

A richly rewarding and thematically coherent work, written with an avid attention to light effects, atmosphere, and the natural world.

A genuinely through-composed work, one poem opening secretly into another as the imagination endures a period of threat, when the reasonable assurances of ordinary civil life are removed by a sense that anything might happen, or that it already is happening. Given the material, the poet's touch is miraculously light.

Deep in limestone country, at the corner of Wiltshire, Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire, lies the village of Coleshill. 
 
This haunting new collection from Fiona Sampson is a portrait of place, both real and imaginary; a dreamscape with its roots deep in the local soil. 
 
The poems hum with an evocative music of their own: there are hymns of the orchards, verses for walkers, songs for bees. These are slices of life and states of mind; poems of grief, fears and maledictions, but also of renewal, resurrections and the promise of spring. 
 
Coleshill emerges as a “parish of sun / and shade”; its darkness and light perfectly balanced. From the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prize shortlisted poet comes a deep, interrogative collection of astonishing clarity and power.

Beyond the Lyric

As groundbreaking as F.R. Leavis's New Bearings in English Poetry, this critical “book of enthusiasms” maps the state of contemporary British poetry

Few are as well qualified to do this as Sampson… Sampson is a thorough and often persuasive close reader

This lovely, hopeful book is a celebration of the richness and variety in British Poetry right now

Vigorous and valuable...the best kind of guide: encouraging, enthusiastic, knowledgeable

This is an engaging, well-structured take on the poetry world, one that invites readers to read more, and to read carefully

British poetry is enjoying a period of exceptional richness and variety. This is exciting but it's also confusing, and throws up the need for an enthusiastic guide that can explain and celebrate the many parallel poetry projects now underway. 
 
Beyond the Lyric does just that. This is a book of enthusiasms: an intelligent and witty map of contemporary British poetry and a radical, accessible guide to living British poets, grouped for the first time according to the kind of poetry they write. 
 
In a series of groundbreaking new classifications, beginning with the bread-and-butter diction of the Plain Dealers and ending on the capacious generosity of the Exploded Lyric, it examines the broad range of contemporary tendencies – from the baroque swagger of the Dandies to the restrained elegance of the Oxford Elegists; from the layered, haunting verse of Mythopoesis to the inventive explorations of the New Formalists. By probing the cultural context from which these groups emerge and shifting the critical focus back to the work itself, Sampson’s astute analysis illuminates and demystifies each of these terms and asks the big questions about what makes a poem. 
 
The result is a celebration of poetry as a connected, responsive and above all communitarian form. Lively, engaging and inviting, this is the indispensible and authoritative guide for anyone who's ever wondered what's going on in British poetry today.

Fiona Sampson

'From [Sampson's] approach emerges a writer who seems as alive as if she had just walked out of the room and could return at any minute. Sand would probably have appreciated Sampson’s sympathetic assessment of the challenges faced by female writers... She would also have enjoyed Sampson’s quietly witty touches. When Sand died... Hugo sent a tribute claiming: “I mourn a dead woman and I salute an immortal one.” Many readers will start this fascinating biography with the assumption that he was merely being polite. By the time they have finished it they will probably agree with him.

Thought-provoking... George is a book written with energy, passion and commitment to its fascinating subject. Indeed, it does just what a literary biography should do: it leaves one wanting to read Sand for oneself.

‘I mourn a dead woman and I salute an immortal one.’ Victor Hugo 
 
‘That men have been able to fall in love with this latrine, is the proof of the abasement of this century’s men.’ Charles Baudelaire 
 
‘An abundance of milk[; a] dairy cow with a “beautiful style”.’ Friedrich Nietzsche 
 
'One had to know her as I did to know how much of the feminine was in that great man, the immensity of tenderness in that genius. Her name will live in unique glory as one of the great figures of France.' Gustave Flaubert 
 
'My friends will respect me, I hope, just as much under my jacket as under my dress. […] Be reassured, I do not aspire to the dignity of man. It seems to me too laughable to be much preferable to the servility of woman. But I claim to possess, today and forever, the superb and complete independence which you alone believe you have the right to enjoy. […] So take me for a man or a woman as you wish.' George Sand

The Invention of George Sand

Born Aurore Dupin in 1804, by the time she was thirty she was internationally renowned as George Sand, her novels out-selling Victor Hugo in the English language. Soon, the legend of Sand herself - cigar-smoking, cross-dressing and promiscuous - scandalised Paris, seeming to break every rule set for women in polite society. 
 
What can we learn from the way she lived? Was her iconoclasm simply an act of courage, a declaration of absolute autonomy, or did her sexual and emotional relationships with the leading figures of her day - from Frederic Chopin to Gustave Flaubert - form part of her dialogue with the world, a dialogue intrinsic to writing itself? 
 
In Becoming George, award-winning poet and biographer Fiona Sampson rehabilitates Sand as an intellectual and artistic giant, the beating heart of French literature in the nineteenth century. For too long underestimated, though never by her peers, she speaks to us as a figure in some ways centuries ahead of her time.

Fiona Sampson

Praise for Becoming George

'From [Sampson's] approach emerges a writer who seems as alive as if she had just walked out of the room and could return at any minute. Sand would probably have appreciated Sampson’s sympathetic assessment o ...

Thought-provoking... George is a book written with energy, passion and commitment to its fascinating subject. Indeed, it does just what a literary biography should do: it leaves one wanting to read San ...

‘I mourn a dead woman and I salute an immortal one.’ Victor Hugo

‘That men have been able to fall in love with this latrine, is the proof of the abasement of this century’s men.’ Charles Baudelaire
< ...

'From [Sampson's] approach emerges a writer who seems as alive as if she had just walked out of the room and could return at any minute. Sand would probably have appreciated Sampson’s sympathetic assessment o ...

Thought-provoking... George is a book written with energy, passion and commitment to its fascinating subject. Indeed, it does just what a literary biography should do: it leaves one wanting to read San ...

‘I mourn a dead woman and I salute an immortal one.’ Victor Hugo

‘That men have been able to fall in love with this latrine, is the proof of the abasement of this century’s men.’ Charles Baudelaire
< ...

'From [Sampson's] approach emerges a writer who seems as alive as if she had just walked out of the room and could return at any minute. Sand would probably have appreciated Sampson’s sympathetic assessment o ...

Thought-provoking... George is a book written with energy, passion and commitment to its fascinating subject. Indeed, it does just what a literary biography should do: it leaves one wanting to read San ...

‘I mourn a dead woman and I salute an immortal one.’ Victor Hugo

‘That men have been able to fall in love with this latrine, is the proof of the abasement of this century’s men.’ Charles Baudelaire
< ...

Books by Fiona Sampson

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Praise for Becoming George

'From [Sampson's] approach emerges a writer who seems as alive as if she had just walked out of the room and could return at any minute. Sand would probably have appreciated Sampson’s sympathetic assessment o ...

Thought-provoking... George is a book written with energy, passion and commitment to its fascinating subject. Indeed, it does just what a literary biography should do: it leaves one wanting to read San ...

‘I mourn a dead woman and I salute an immortal one.’ Victor Hugo ‘That men have been able to fall in love with this latrine, is the proof of the abasement of this century’s men.’ Charles Baudelaire < ...

'From [Sampson's] approach emerges a writer who seems as alive as if she had just walked out of the room and could return at any minute. Sand would probably have appreciated Sampson’s sympathetic assessment o ...

Thought-provoking... George is a book written with energy, passion and commitment to its fascinating subject. Indeed, it does just what a literary biography should do: it leaves one wanting to read San ...

‘I mourn a dead woman and I salute an immortal one.’ Victor Hugo ‘That men have been able to fall in love with this latrine, is the proof of the abasement of this century’s men.’ Charles Baudelaire < ...

'From [Sampson's] approach emerges a writer who seems as alive as if she had just walked out of the room and could return at any minute. Sand would probably have appreciated Sampson’s sympathetic assessment o ...

Thought-provoking... George is a book written with energy, passion and commitment to its fascinating subject. Indeed, it does just what a literary biography should do: it leaves one wanting to read San ...

‘I mourn a dead woman and I salute an immortal one.’ Victor Hugo ‘That men have been able to fall in love with this latrine, is the proof of the abasement of this century’s men.’ Charles Baudelaire < ...

Books by Fiona Sampson

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter

‘I mourn a dead woman and I salute an immortal one.’ Victor Hugo

‘That men have been able to fall in love with this latrine, is the proof of the abasement of this century’s men.’ Charles Baudelaire
< ...

‘I mourn a dead woman and I salute an immortal one.’ Victor Hugo

‘That men have been able to fall in love with this latrine, is the proof of the abasement of this century’s men.’ Charles Baudelaire
< ...

‘I mourn a dead woman and I salute an immortal one.’ Victor Hugo

‘That men have been able to fall in love with this latrine, is the proof of the abasement of this century’s men.’ Charles Baudelaire
< ...