Books by Fiona Sampson

'A nourishing, occasionally provoking hybrid of group biography, cultural criticism and travelogue that seeks to restore to Romanticism its radicalism, and also show just how much the countryside shaped its manifesto' Hephzibah Anderson, Mail on Sunday We think we know the Romantic countryside: that series of picturesque landscapes familiar from paintings, poems and music that are still part of Britain's idea of itself today.But for the Romantics themselves, the countryside was a place where radical change was underway both within and around them. 'Romanticism isn't a cultural artefact; it's a way for thought to move,' writes highly acclaimed biographer and poet Fiona Sampson in this transporting and vividly evocative book, in which she spends a year walking in the Romantics' footsteps, from Kent to Kintyre. Setting out across ten landscapes, as the Romantics once did as they wrote, travelled, settled, or tried to define the rural environment, Fiona Sampson walks not with a sense of nostalgic clich , but radically alive to interaction between the human and the natural world.So how were poets, writers, artists and philosophers of the time shaped by their natural environment? And how can we return to the vividness with which they experienced it? Starlight Wood is part group biography, part cultural history, and part an essay about place. In it, we find Percy Bysshe Shelley and Elizabeth Barrett Browning using diet as a symbol of radicalism, and John Constable revealing the emptiness of the post-Enclosure British countryside; while the young William Wordsworth follows the ideal of radical sensibility into the heart of Revolutionary France, and the biggest military structure in Britain since Hadrian's Wall is engineered on Romney Marsh to keep Napoleon at bay.Moving intuitively between art, politics, agriculture, science and philosophy, and punctuated by the author's personal reflections - most movingly on the death during the pandemic of her artist father, whose line-and-wash drawings act as gateways through which we embark on each walk - Starlight Wood brilliantly examines the importance of the countryside in shaping Romantic attitudes, and offers a gripping insight into the lives of some of the most influential figures of the age.

Come Down is a bravura new collection from eminent UK poet, Fiona Sampson. Her publications include twenty-nine volumes of poetry, criticism and philosophy of language. Sampson has been shortlisted twice for both the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prizes.

On Listening is a collection of essays covering many of the key areas of contemporary debate in creative writing. From translation as the art of the impossible to the significance of community writing projects, by way of teaching debate and personal enthusiasms, it affords a portrait of the field as a whole.

Today, poetry and art music occupy similar cultural positions. This is a study of these two formal craft traditions that is concerned with the similarities in their roles, structures, projects and capacities.

Fiona Sampson's latest collection transforms the sensory world into an astonishingly new and vivid poetry. Here, dream and myth, creatures real and imagined, and the sights and sounds of 'distance and of home' all coalesce in a sustained meditation on time and belonging.

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to the most important poets in our literature.Music, when soft voices die,Vibrates in the memory --Odours, when sweet violets sicken,Live within the sense they quicken.-- To

Three lectures on contemporary poetry by one of Britain's leading poets, Fiona Sampson. Her lectures discuss the relationship between poetry, music and ideas, taking examples from a diverse range of writers, composers and philosophers.

This unique and comprehensive 'map' of the topic of creative writing in health and social care brings together contributions from health and social care professionals and provides the information needed to teach, counsel and write. Case studies range from work with pre-literate children in post-war Macedonia to people with dementia in Britain.