Coleshill

by Fiona Sampson

Coleshill, a nineteenth-century model village on the borders of Wiltshire, Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire, is a microcosm of contemporary rural life. It includes organic dairy herds, prairie fields, community-owned windmills, lovingly-tended vegetable gardens, lamping for hares, a shoot, a Peace Fete, a Neolithic hill fort, a nursery school, a pub and just about the same number of inhabitants -- two hundred, give or take a newborn -- that it had in the Domesday book.

At the same time its countryside still offers our best chance of observing the natural world. Three different species of ladybird co-exist on a house wall, and the first lapwings return; a spring shifting in the limestone water-table floods the lane, and buzzards nest in the beech trees on Kings Hill.

Coleshill explores the village as both community and place. Starting with a "braid" of poems about the genetic bond between all members of every human group, it then launches into a series of portraits of the members of the village community. Each speaks for him or herself -- we eavesdrop on their inner lives as they worry, fall asleep, mourn, plan, flirt and work. The book ends with a sequence of sonnets about the place itself.

Coleshill follows the cycle of a year and creates a meditative portrait of real life in the country, bringing the people living there to life.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published March 7, 2013

About the author

Fiona Ruth Sampson, MBE is an English poet and writer. She is published in thirty-seven languages and has received a number of national and international awards for her writing.

Sampson was educated at the Royal Academy of Music, and following a brief career as a concert violinist, studied at Oxford University, where she won the Newdigate Prize. She gained a PhD in the philosophy of language from Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. She advises internationally on creative writing in healthcare, a field whose development she pioneered in a number of projects and publications. As a young poet she was the founder-director of Poetryfest – the Aberystwyth International Poetry Festival and the founding editor of Orient Express, a journal of contemporary writing from Europe. She has received a number of international writers' fellowships: I.A. Literary Association, Skojcan, Slovenia, 2015, Greek Writers’ Union Writers’ and Translators’ House, Paros, 2011, Estonian Writers’ Union House, Kasmu, 2009, Heinrich Boll House, Achill Island, 2005, Fundacion Valparaiso, Spain, 2002, Hawthornden Castle, 2001, Fondacion da Casa de Mateus, Portugal, 2001. She held an Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship at Oxford Brookes University 2002-5, a CAPITAL Fellowship in Creativity at the University of Warwick 2007-8 and a Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, Institute of Musical Research & Institute of English Studies: 2012-15.

From 2005-12, Sampson was the editor of Poetry Review, the oldest and most widely read poetry journal in the UK. She was the first woman editor of the journal since Muriel Spark (1947–49). In January 2013 she founded Poem, a quarterly international review, published by the University of Roehampton, where Sampson is Professor of Poetry and the Director of Roehampton Poetry Centre.

She lives in Herefordshire.

Reviews

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Coleshill
Fiona Sampson (Author)
In her new collection, the critically acclaimed poet Fiona Sampson has used her undeniable gift for language to produce poetry that is by turns fragile, beautiful, worldly, strong, delicate, ethereal, and at all times completely rooted in real life and real places as well as the imagination. The poems are about nature, and about life, but much more about our place within it.
With scalpel like precision, Sampson looks at the plights of bees in winter, or through a number of inter-linked sonnets at how the natural world, and the human body are interlinked. Over forty-six poems, there are themes and ideas that are continuously refined and developed, so although the poems work individually, they add to a far stronger suite of ideas than is often the case with poetry collections. There is a lot to like, absorb and digest in this book, and in a world where much is so often quickly replaced by modern technology, it is a sober reminder about our place in the world, and how we can maintain that place.

[Габриела Манова]

Не беше моето.

[Kate · Rating 2 out of 5]

1.5*

This is the third collection of Fiona Sampson's poetry that I have read. I loved The Catch, Rough Music was okay, and now Coleshill I wasn't very keen on. Maybe it means more if you know the village of Coleshill, but for me I found the majority of the poems cold and lifeless. I found them to be missing the spark that would bring them to life. I could catch glimpses, but nothing more. I was unsure about so much, which normally I enjoy not understanding, but I just wasn't interested enough to try to work stuff out. It didn't help that they didn't resonate for me. Saying that, one did, which I thought was beautiful, 'Sonnet Number 8 - Summer Dusk'. I also liked the dark unnerving tone created in 'Sonnets 1' and '2'. Were the Sonnets all suppose to join up? They sort of did, kind of, if you squint. I also loved the image of the bees falling from the sky in the tiny poem 'Little Songs of Malediction 2', that was great. A line I particularly loved, which I think sums up my thoughts of Sampson's work (which I will continue to read), "Everything good/ still waits/ in the next field,/ the best/ is yet to come/ and it smells of warm earth" (The Corn Versicles).

[Tasha · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection for anyone Local. I don't mean local to Coleshill but local in the sense of community, of knowing potholes, of knowing Terry as a man and then as a ghost of himself walking down the main road home. Local.
This is a collection of rhythm, of human rhythm falling into place with nature. Of humans becoming the natural landscape - and isn't it about time? 'a phone rings' and the butterfly effect is set in motion as 'suddenly flocks of starling / are shuttling across the dark'.

http://natashaborton.blogspot.co.uk/2...

[Ophelia · Rating 2 out of 5]

This collection felt like it meant a lot to Fiona Sampson but she put little effort into sharing those feelings with the reader. As vague and disconnected from itself as the last time I read it, but I did still enjoy ‘THE CHANGES’.

[Sarah westcott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haunting in the best, truest sense. Mesmeric language; refined atmosphere. For me, her best collection