Coleshill
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.
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.