Come Down

WINNER OF THE WALES POETRY BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2021

Winner of the Naim Frasheri Laureateship of Albania and Macedonia

Winner of the European Lyric Atlas Prize

‘Fiona Sampson’s voice is something new and it’s a delight to hear it … A joy to read’ W. S. Merwin

Questions of humanity, of point of view, are at the heart of Fiona Sampson’s new collection, Come Down.

Throughout, Sampson’s poems shimmer between the human perspective and what is beyond - some larger, longer-term consciousness. Language runs and dances over the stuff of the human body and the material of the landscape. And yet, despite these radical perspective shifts, the collection keeps in sight, always, the human experience: the act of creation; the way in which childhood memory and family lore impinge on the present.

Come Down ends with a long, eponymous poem, which moves fluidly and brilliantly through different forms of memory.