Reading Fiona Sampson

This book-length study of an eminent, distinguished and influential poet and contemporary woman of letters integrates analysis and a honed interpretation of the near-total gamut of the oeuvre to-date of Professor Fiona Sampson. The study includes biographical insight and synthesizes its rigorous discussions of the dominant rubric of Professor Sampson’s poetic métier, her prose in different genres, and the literary practices of over a decades-long and much-lauded literary career.  This critical work finds and displays incisive and fruitful ways by which the oeuvre in question crosses boundaries in literary writing and practices with fertile results and evidences those cross-currents in a manner that indicates the trajectory of a sensibility or structure of feeling, one which though highly intelligent and self-aware is also deeply empathic. A lucid, coherent and compelling reading of Sampson’s main works makes this book a scintillating study and a much needed contribution to the current work being done on major contemporary poets and writers and, in particular, contemporary women figures, in the British and international literary scenes.

Omar Sabbagh, Associate Professor of English at the American University in Dubai (AUD), is a widely published poet, writer and critic. He has published scholarly work on Ford Madox Ford, GK Chesterton, Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller, Lytton Strachey, T.S. Eliot, George Eliot, among others; and much of this work is collated in his: To My Mind Or Kinbotes: Essays on Literature (Whisk(e)y Tit, 2021). His Morning Lit: Portals After Alia is forthcoming with Cinnamon Press in early 2022. His Lebanese verse novel: The Cedar Never Dies has been contracted with Northside Press for 2022.