Fiona Sampson
(England)
Two poems from Rough Music
Out of the Attic
Things we love go with us
like marginalia,
those detours
early illuminators made.
They’re detours for us, too,
useless and nourishing as dreams,
or the way a milk of mist
stripes fields on early summer mornings
when the air’s pink.
Someone’s asleep close by,
and a skin’s exhalations –
that faint salt-scent
when you slip from a bed
and stand at the window,
gazing down the dawn lane –
suggest a happiness
which rests in us
as if it had prior possession,
and no philosophy
were necessary to joy.
The intimacy of father and son
unravels, as a child grows to equal
the man who was his measure.
The night-shapes that terrified us
in attic bedrooms,
angels and shades,
curl at our feet like pets.
The Hare
The bell, the fist, a hiccup in the blood
when the hawk comes to your glove
and folds there, dark as the hooded figure
who flaws your gaze like an eyelash
and darkens through that gaze.
He’s a time-signature
of moves you’ve yet to make in love.
But you’re already at the dark wood.
The hobby shakes his hood, trees their leaves,
row after row of trembling gold
dressed in shadow. You’re trembling, too,
as if you already knew
what your dream now chooses to reveal –
the fugitive among the trees.
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Fiona Sampson was first a concert violinist, and later studied at the Universities of Oxford and Nijmegen, where she received a PhD in the philosophy of language. Her interests include writing in health care, and translation. Her seventeen books include Rough Music (shortlisted for the 2010 Forward and T.S. Eliot Prizes). Published in thirty languages, her eleven books in translation include Patuvachki Dnevnik, awarded the Zlaten Prsten (Macedonia, 2004). She has received the Newdigate Prize, the Charles Angoff Award of The Literary Review (US, 2007), a Cholmondeley Award, a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, Writer’s Awards from the Arts Councils of England and Wales, and been elected a Fellow and Council Member of the Royal Society of Literature. She is the Editor of Poetry Review (founded 1909).