Sampson Fiona Sampson

SHORTLISTED FOR THE SLIGHTLY FOXED BEST FIRST BIOGRAPHY AWARD 2018'If we get another literary biography in 2018 as astute and feelingful as this one, we shall be lucky.' - John Carey, Sunday TimesMary Shelley was brought up by her father in a house filled with radical thinkers, poets, philosophers and writers of the day. Aged sixteen, she eloped with Percy Bysshe Shelley, embarking on a relationship that was lived on the move across Britain and Europe, as she coped with debt, infidelity and the deaths of three children, before early widowhood changed her life forever. Most astonishingly, it was while she was still a teenager that Mary composed her canonical novel Frankenstein, creating two of our most enduring archetypes today. The life story is well-known. But who was the woman who lived it? She's left plenty of evidence, and in this fascinating dialogue with the past, Fiona Sampson sifts through letters, diaries and records to find the real woman behind the story. She uncovers a complex, generous character - friend, intellectual, lover and mother - trying to fulfil her own passionate commitment to writing at a time when to be a woman writer was an extraordinary and costly anomaly. Published for the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein, this is a major new work of biography by a prize-winning writer and poet.

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.

 This book explores the intersections between wearable objects and human health, with particular emphasis on how artists and designers are creatively responding to and rethinking these relations. Addressing a rich range of wearable artefacts, from mobility aids and prosthetics to clothing and accessories to digital health tracking devices, its themes include care and cure; wellness culture and the commoditization of health; and the complex interactions between (human) bodies and (non-human) objects. With a theoretical framework inspired by the work of materialist thinkers including Sherry Turkle, Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett, and bringing the disciplinary fields of fashion studies, art and design practice, and medical and health humanities into dialogue for the first time, this volume draws attention to the complex agencies entangled in the things we wear, and situates fashion and art in relation to broader cultural and historical contexts of health, illness and disability.  

Shortlisted for the 2022 Plutarch AwardA Washington Post 2021 Non-Fiction Book of the YearNew York Times Review of Books Editors' Choice Non-Fiction TitleLonglisted for the 2022 PEN / Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for BiographyA Sunday Times Best Paperback of 2022'Brilliant, heart-stopping ... reads like a thriller, a memoir and a provocative piece of literary fiction all at the same time ... magical and compelling' Washington Post'How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,' Elizabeth Barrett Browning famously wrote, shortly before defying her family by running away to Italy with Robert Browning. But behind the romance of her extraordinary life stands a thoroughly modern figure, who remains an electrifying study in self-invention. Elizabeth was born in 1806, a time when women could neither attend university nor vote, and yet she achieved lasting literary fame. She remains Britain's greatest woman poet, whose work has inspired writers from Emily Dickinson to George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. This vividly written biography, the first full study for over thirty years, incorporates recent archival discoveries to reveal the woman herself: a literary giant and a high-profile activist for the abolition of slavery who believed herself to be of mixed heritage; and a writer who defied chronic illness and long-term disability to change the course of cultural history. It holds up a mirror to the woman, her art - and the art of biography itself.

This book is really a must-have for therapists and others in the creative arts, so that you can see how the workings of the human mind can be displayed through the arts. Even with serious illness, the mind can talk. And that is the point of the book'.- Metapsychology Online Book Reviews'The references cited at the end of each chapter are instructive and useful with some contributors drawing on memoirs and creative work and others on textbooks and papers. As Fiona points out in her introduction, those with an interest in the field - which includes clinicians, patients, arts managers, psychotherapists, writers, occupational therapists, teachers - I am sure you can add to the list - inevitably speak different languages, reflecting their different priorities. I agree with her argument that this contributes to a healthy diversity of practice that may offer "something for everyone" and we should resist narrow definitions. The challenge for those of us in the field is to locate ourselves on this strange and exciting map and to chart our own experiences in whatever languages are appropriate. Conferences, such as Strange Baggage and the increasingly popular Lapidus annual event provide an excellent opportunity to journey beyond our usual borders to exchange travellers' tales with our colleagues'. - Lapidus'An incisive collection of essays and case studies, where theory is applied to practical goals: working out methods for how to help and understand those with problems threatening their sanity or stability. Creative expression can contribute to personal and community health.' - Writing in Education'Creative Writing in Health and Social Care is full of experience of working with patients with dementia, hospital, hospice and occupational therapy patients, and those in primary care. This is innovative work - deeply helpful to the patients, illuminatively described.'- The British Journal of General PracticeThis unique and comprehensive 'map' of the topic of creative writing in health and social care brings together contributions from health and social care professionals and provides the information needed to teach, counsel and write. Principally exploring poetry and story writing and telling, case studies range from work with pre-literate children in post-war Macedonia to people with dementia in Britain. Complementing these insights, theory-based contributions provide context, comparing different arts therapies using psychoanalytic and phenomenological theories of art and ideas, assessing the value of creative writing in a health care setting, examining methods of training therapists and looking at the aims of creative writing in terms of self development. This holistic approach ensures that Creative Writing in Health and Social Care is an essential guide for health care professionals and others seeking to use creative writing in therapeutic settings.

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.

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.

'A nourishing, occasionally provoking hybrid of group biography, cultural criticism and travelogue that seeks to restore to Romanticism its radicalism, and also show just how much the countryside shaped its manifesto' Hephzibah Anderson, Mail on Sunday'"Romanticism isn't a cultural artefact," [Sampson] writes. "It's a way for thought to move." She is taking her own mind for a walk and [...] the essence is intellectual and fully freighted. The cast list is long and international and the method shifting, subtle and demanding' Adam Nicolson, GuardianFor the Romantics, the countryside was a place of radical change. But those real life experiences have been overlaid by two centuries of clich . To rediscover - and learn from - their radicalism we need to find a fresh approach.In this extraordinary hybrid of scholarship, biography, cultural history, travelogue and lifewriting, acclaimed poet and Romantic biographer Fiona Sampson does just that. As she walks the British countryside, from the Isle of Wight to Kintyre, her evocative and thought-provoking book helps us see clearly what's hiding in plain sight.

WINNER OF THE WALES POETRY BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2021Winner of the Naim Frash ri Laureateship of Albania and Macedonia Winner of the European Lyric Atlas Prize 'Fiona Sampson's voice is something new and it's a delight to hear it . . . A joy to read' W. S. MerwinQuestions of humanity, of point of view, are at the heart of Fiona Sampson's new collection, Come Down.Throughout, Sampson's poems shimmer between the human perspective and what is beyond - some larger, longer-term consciousness. Language runs and dances over the stuff of the human body and the material of the landscape. And yet, despite these radical perspective shifts, the collection keeps in sight, always, the human experience: the act of creation; the way in which childhood memory and family lore impinge on the present. Come Down ends with a long, eponymous poem, which moves fluidly and brilliantly through different forms of memory.

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to the most important poets in our literature. Music, when soft voices die,Vibrates in the memory --Odours, when sweet violets sicken,Live within the sense they quicken. -- To