Matthew Sperling reviews Common Prayer by Fiona Sampson

The poems in Common Prayer give evidence of a sensibility faced in several unlikely-seeming directions at once: erotic and philosophical, internationalist and Christian, bookish and compulsively image-making. If there's sometimes a sense that the longer pieces in the book summon these parts together in a way that doesn't quite add up, at the same time, their combination makes Fiona Sampson a writer of unique vividness and intellectual curiosity.

One of the most productive forms of this curiosity is the capacity to be so taken by an object or a set of terms that the poem is moved to redescribe them, and redescribe again. Lots of images, lots of metaphors: as in the poetry of Charles Tomlinson, the task of attending faithfully to an object becomes not just an ethical imperative but also a feat of moral stamina. 'She is / the stretched line of attention holding itself, / breath stilled', goes the ending of 'A Sacrament of Watering', where 'she' is a wren. Sampson's lines are always impressively stretchy, holding steady under the weight of so much repeated attentiveness. 'Attitudes of Prayer' summons up Beethoven's 'One hundred and thirty-one approaches / to the problem of God', but in the process clearly addresses one of Sampson's own poetic procedures:

           Imagine it:
over and over
rehearsing what you don't know,
soundlessly.
          Letting yourself transcribe
what no one's said before

While the poems are awake to their own repetitions, they don't always manage to hold back from lapsing or rising into a sort of histrionic attentiveness ('over and over' indeed). This compulsion to the prayerful and the metaphorical brings to mind the earnest questingness of recent Jorie Graham poems (a mode that I believe North American readers know as 'Big Hair Poetry'). It's never less than well done, and the mode suits Sampson, but it might not suit the patience and inclination of every reader.

Along with Graham and John Burnside, who gives a generous blurb to this book, Sampson seems to form part of what's almost becoming a late twentieth-century school of philosophical poetry. But the level at which a poet engages with philosophy presents certain problems to do with diction. In an interview, Roy Fisher has self-effacingly described the manner in which his poems front up to perceptual problems: 'It's rather like setting myself the task of punching my way out of a paper bag. Quite easy but rewardingly noisy. I never get in to the plastic ones.' Against this stands the intensity of Geoffrey Hill's self-projection as a latter-day Jacob wrestling with the Angel. One of the questions, then, for the poet engaged with the matter of philosophy, is how to avoid getting into arguments you know you're going to win, where the poem becomes a sort of victory-parade. In  Sampson's poem 'The Looking Glass', we get two sections of phenomenological odds and ends recorded with remarkable precision, where syntax and line-breaks are as finely calibrated as 'the oscillograph's / fluttering wing'. But then the third section opens with a question that is, as the saying goes, 'rhetorical':

Or does this in fact have to do with language?

The problem is, when the poet who asks this question has previously written a book called Writing: Self and Reflexity and 'has a PhD in the philosophy of language', as the biography tells us, all bets are off as to what the answer might be. Sure enough, it turns out this does in fact 'have to do' with language: 'The way it hooks, draws in, / every name / a displacement...' But the gears of philosophical discourse have been so guilelessly cranked into motion now that the poem has a lot of work to do to get back what it was good at in the first place.

In among these extended worryings at the denotable world come shorter lyrics and sonnets, often concerned with our bodily or erotic life. The sex that seems to go on in these poems is probably not the sex that most people would want to be having: there's a 'nipple raised to Upper Case - / that taps your palate' in 'Take, Eat', a 'sticky martyrdom' in 'Body Mass', then a slow death that seems to aspire to the condition of an orgasm in 'The Plunge':

Even as I tighten my hold
you're disappearing.
You telescope into your own black centre.

Is this it?
                All the love-feast
this salty
drip-feed?

Sometimes Sampson's fragmenting bodies are held together with end-rhymes and tetrameters; but these poems seem to me less successful than Sampson's irregular lines, their word-orders often forced into a maladroit, approximating clippedness: 'Its sip and gulp, its search for why / he's on his knees before it, performs / a kind of private liturgy / for itself', goes 'Body Mass', where 'it' is desire – but what 'kind' of liturgy exactly, and do we really need 'sip' and 'gulp' except to fill in the metrical cross-stitch, and why is it 'performs' when that verb evidently has a plural subject, except that it has to rhyme with 'bones' three lines later?

One of the pleasures of this book comes in the visual composition of the poems; Sampson makes use of the page attractively, and usually with good effect, to point the measure of the verse, with broken-backed or stepped lines (again recalling the recent books of John Burnside), carefully irregularized paragraphs keyed in to tonal variations, and frequent studdings of italic type. In 'A Sacrament of Watering', quoted earlier, we even get three sets of back-to-front brackets, again in a Jorie Grahamish vein, to notate the entrance of the Eliotic bird ('quick quick said the bird', another poem here says; and Burnside has written a poem called 'Four Quartets'; enough is enough, surely):

)White snap of wings(
            ...
wide open         )light(                O
            ...
)movement of transformation(

Some readers may be unconvinced that the fiddliness of this last effect is worth the trouble, but as with all the other visual aspects of the book, the meaningfulness of the page design is clear. In fact, you could make a capsule version of Common Prayer comprising only those parts of the poems set in italics, and it would give a good idea of what the book is about: 'Make a joyful noise / unto the Lord... Abandon hope... joy... I'm yours alone... my praying mouth vouches for me... why... we... glas... nature mort (sic?)... love... Listen... Imagine the lotus... further, further... look... look... gemütlich... semblable, frère...', and so on. A psalm, Dante's Hell, some French and German, some Baudelaire via Eliot, some Buddhism via Eliot, some intimate whispers which are also imperatives to look, look closer: all these things and more snag the imagination, and make Common Prayer a book worth returning to.

Fiona Sampson, Common Prayer. Carcanet, £9.95

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.