LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

FIONA SAMPSON (b. 1963) writes with exquisite delicacy of feeling and image. Her love is poignant and strikes deep, painful roots. Her imagery covers the page like ivy, and the poem is all a lace of sensibility:

It doesn't matter what I say or do,

You don't love me. That's the end of it.

Doesn't matter that I loved so well

I lost myself in keeping sight of you.

No gifts, no words, no tendernesses prove

Truths that you untell, the proofs you fell

Blind to logic, making stories fit

The way your shoulder used to, or the tender groove

Between your thumb and palm that once clipped mine

Neat as a file, holding knowledge tight:

That you were mine. You're not tonight.

Instead I travel on, through dark so fine

You might think that was what got in my eyes:

And not the strain of saying these goodbyes. (The X File)

The lyrical beings in Fiona Sampson’s poems have tentacles of emotion and seem on the verge of drowning. The only rescue is the reading of these poems which constantly walk the rope between sense and soul, not wanting to admit which is the abyss and which ecstasy.

Fear of Drowning is a poem written while ‘waiting for my dreams to pass’. Like most of Fiona Sampson’s texts, it is a poem of fragile loss and yet of indomitable, stubborn victory. The poet is stronger when she seems most helpless. Hers is a tragic vein, lit by the wings of her feelings, all ready to fly far away, to a country of love and grace. A country of words for music perhaps.

by VIC (Cristina Ioana Vianu)