Fiona Sampson [UK]

 

After Goya 
 
In Goya’s drawings the line’s frenzied even when the content seems less than disgusting
that girl dancing for example    with or without the leering crowd the lightness of her feet                                          and the movement in her shift dress float
almost       but in his portraits the face emerges from crosshatching
as if the whole image were a rubbing taken of the face in which darker patches emerge                                                under the pencil shading
 
regardless of what the artist does which makes me think about portraits in general
or the way we look at people and let them impress themselves on us
this girl for example I’ve been trying to help out who responds not with friendliness––                                                call and response––
but with sullen anger & desire to compete and displace
 
so great it seems is her fury that anyone should experience a happiness she doesn’t know                                       how to             make but only to spoil
so that skulking between the rose bushes and the house wall
are the deep shadows of her withholding
traps and booby traps then      but how strange the way she impresses herself
 
on my soft heart on my uncovered summer skin like a stamp––DECLINED––
all the old wounds rising to it through the blizzard of crosshatchings
 
  
 
27 March 
 
Behold and
behold says
the goldfinch
over
and over
though whether
he means himself
or the spring
is unclear
perhaps even
to himself
because what
is going on
is distension
morning shaping
up like an
inflatable
 
and the harried
conscientious
I finds
itself enlarged
by what surrounds it––
frail
and absolutely
certain
margin of everything
that is
the morning case 
 
 

Meadowsweet 
 
All along the lane
stars bloom and dazzle
they leap to the eye
 
as if to pull us in––
mazy explosions
of odour
 
in an umbelliferous
tangle
which surely no one
 
could pass unnoticing
passerby
as you are we were
 
as we are
so you will be––
transfigured by some final
 
mystery––
it’s the old promise
some of us learnt
 
in childhood
and here we come hurrying
or slow
 
wearing our summer
clothes which are like
new memories
 
to witness again
how it is and how it
will be 
 

 
Author’s Bionote:
 
*Fiona Sampson is a leading British poet and writer who has received numerous awards for her poetry. In the UK, these include an MBE for services to literature, the Society of Authors Cholmondeley award, the University of Oxford Newdigate Prize. She has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, of the Wordsworth Trust, of the Royal Society of Arts and of the English Association. Among her international awards – in the US, Bosnia, India, France, Sweden, Albania and North Macedonia – her most recent of eight poetry collections, “Come Down” (2021), received the European Lyric Atlas prize, the Naim Frasheri laureateship, and Wales Poetry Book of the Year. Professor Emerita of Poetry, University of Roehampton, and Senior Research Fellow at Harris Manchester College University of Oxford, Fiona Sampson has published more than thirty books and been translated into thirty-eight languages. She has held writing fellowships in a number of European countries, including Slovenia, Greece, Serbia, Ireland, Portugal and Spain. She has received Arts and Humanities Research Council, Arts Councils of England and Wales, and Society of Authors awards for her work, has served on the governing Council of the Royal Society of Literature and is a Trustee of the Royal Literary Fund. She collaborates frequently with musicians and artists, and on literary co-translation. She’s also a critic, broadcaster and editor, including of the UK’s national Poetry Review 2005-12, who often serves on international prize juries. Among the many accolades her prose work has received, “Two-Way Mirror” (2021) was a “New York Times” Bestseller, and “In Search of Mary Shelley” was a London “Times” Book of the Year.