Screen-iron of sanctuary and communion rail, in a dark church; a hassock rasping the knees.
Struggle. Prayer as continuing failure.
The self mounting by questions to collapse – God was in his own unbridgeable distance.
So what for her is Common Prayer? It is a super-sensitive awareness of the world around, coupled with a recognition of the divine in human relationships. The latter produces erotic poems with religious titles such as Body Mass, in which sex is worship. Here every line uses religious language to describe the sex act, ending ‘chasing flights of angels, he/ tumbles to earth himself – in we.’ In Take, Eat we read ‘Kissing and praying? Not the same’ and yet, the poet adds, each is saying ‘I’m yours alone. Self, ambition, fall away here.’ Two of the poems are almost unbearably poignant, describing a beloved person dying in hospital. In one of these, The Miracle Cabinet, the ‘cabinet’ is the hospital lift but the whole painful experience is framed in biblical language.
Before we proceed, a health warning. It needs to be said that this is not a book for those who cannot cope with the hints and disjunctions of contemporary poetry. Your brain may hurt. Many of the poems are ‘difficult’, but not one lacks the divine spark. They excite, they lift, they throw light on the mundane scene in a truly religious transfiguration. The poet Charles Tomlinson declared that he sought ‘a poetry of water, light and air’. Fiona Sampson has found such a poetry. Many of her images are of water and light, images derived from a fine-tuned close observation. Her poems reveal what she calls ‘the stretched line of attention holding itself/ breath stilled.’ In La Source, for instance, a spring is where ‘a lens of rising water/ bends the grass.’ The words ‘light’ and ‘window’ recur throughout the book, in many poems several times. Attitudes of Prayer is not a simple poem but has a series of very simple images of light: ‘Light glints on a door-handle,/ draws parallels on the carpet… Lamplight on skin, on a polished table.’ A poem called Night Fugue begins with the arresting line ‘Gathering left-over light, the barn owl…’ For Mehr Licht the epigraph is from Goethe: ‘Open the second shutter too, so more light can come in.’ A key sentence in the poem is ‘The word you’re looking for is/ incandescence.’ The poem ends with a splendid image of the energy of light: waves of colour-particles are washing your hair, they’re thrown streaming down your back – soundlessly the whole scarf of light; the pulsing crown.
Fiona Sampson opens for her readers that second shutter we too seldom use. As she stands on Trumpledor Beach:
Water breaks lightly on sand – a rhythmic exhalation… salt-blisters bloom between your toes like the blossom of foam… Through each pale colour you can almost see light itself.
From the beach she passes to The modern city, tremoring against an early-morning sky… It shifts in light the way water shifts a gleam from place to place.
Not all Sampson’s poems are in free verse. Some, such as Body Mass, are sonnets, albeit with flexible line lengths.
Two of these refer to nuns. One begins ‘Slim as a nun, I lie along/ the margin of a borrowed bed’ and goes on to ask ‘Abandonment… is this, then, what incarnation means?’ Anchorage speaks at first scathingly of how Those fasting women in their cells drained a honeycomb brain of every sugar drop of sense… Would any question what she did to distance her from how we live, outside such dedication?
Yet the poet closes with an aching appreciation: she is left with a taste of something sweet – the emptied self a room swept white.
One imagines perhaps a Catholic or high Anglican background for this poet, now necessarily left behind yet still providing her with a mental framework and religious language. So, yes, Common Prayer is in a strange sense a religious book, but the poet’s common prayer is a matter of attentiveness to this world – in her own words, ‘Obedience/ to this given world.’ She makes us see the sacramental in the ordinary, and that is a poet’s most precious task.
Anne Ashworth reviews Common Prayer by Fiona Sampson.
Carcanet (Manchester). 2007. 74 pages. £9.95. ISBN 9781857549423 reviews Throughout human history, ‘to go barefoot’ has been seen as either the manifestation of extreme poverty, or as an expression of the wish to discard material belongings and to live in simplicity. One remembers Gandhi.