Poetry: From transition and its discontents come poems of intimacy, identity and anxiety.
Though born in London and raised in Wales, the writer, editor and translator Fiona Sampson writes with a European sensibility that is much closer to the Balkans than to Britain, and though this trend is bucked somewhat by the structure of her newest work (it is presented not as a collection, but as a verse-novel in the tradition of writers such as Craig Raine and Glyn Maxwell), still, in its voice and its vision, this book arcs memorably across a continent.
Sampson's thematic concern is with a love affair in distress, and the language of these 14 poems - grouped in pairs, like a series of distinct but deeply bound overtures and operas - charts with a thrillingly original touch the blind hope and bitter helplessness of two people trapped in a deadening love:
so high
so far
day splits around them.
Meanwhile, in darkness,
the heart
A plump irritable plum.
Sampson's unerring eye for the memories buried in apparently mundane sights, her instinct for the fresh and perfect metaphor, was already in evidence with her Folding the Real (2001), and here it appears again, well honed: winter fields seen from a train window are like "groomed fur" advancing and retreating; a summer park filled with lovers is a "fairground of browse and grab"; a young violinist scents "sweat sour on . . . strings"; a woman's caressed thighs "open/like a vowel".
And such moments of insight would pulse strongly enough to give vigour to every poem in this book, were it merely a book of poems - but a verse-novel has need of a more sustained, more intricate, and therefore more taxing heartbeat. For this, Sampson turns to the dynamic of the unconscious mind. Recurring motifs - the lover's hand, gesturing obscurely; the path; the surfaces of mirrors and glass - are folded into the evolving narrative like memories trailing through dream landscapes. In two of the longer poems - The Velvet Shutter and Brief Encounter - the speaking subject is jolted into conscious awareness to confront firstly the vanities, then the vulnerabilities, of her life. And the final poem, The Secret Flowers, ends with a dissolution of narrative, a collapse, under pressure of intense emotional pain, of reason, of conscious control - a dazzling, dizzying plunge into the realm of id.
Where Sampson's use of the verse-novel form attempts to do more than this, however, with a solemn look at the very elements of language itself - of line, of meaning, of form and sense - it fails. It namechecks these ideas, but goes no distance towards their development or interrogation, thus opening a door through which cliché can too easily sneak in; witness the final poem, with its declaration that "Love's where meaning/comes to rest". Meaning, in Sampson's best poetry, doesn't come to rest at all; it storms its way on, at once poignantly and brutally, through love and its losses.
Meaning is more difficult to come by in the new book of poems by Hugh Maxton (also known as the literary historian WJ McCormack), written during the poet's move from London to rural Ulster. Poems 2000-2005 is a densely textured, determinedly intellectual collection in five sections, which sounds its most affecting notes when dealing not with the politics of sectarianism or literary theory (a literary critic named "Terry", scorned in one poem for his "caoining" of Irish Letters, can only be one person), but with the tensions and tediums, more striking for their being more intimate, of life in a rural community. His foothold on this ground is traditional but solid, as evidenced by stanzas of Dry Lightning ("Of that dusty light/a handful still cleaves") or Legend of the Lamp Room, and from here he can climb to more profound depths, as with the fine elegy Matin.
Generally, however, Maxton does not stay close to his strengths in this collection; instead of the directness of tone which suits his verse, he favours an obscurity of image and allusion unbacked by the linguistic confidence or freshness necessary to draw the reader in. This is particularly marked in the poems in which Maxton sticks to a strict metre, imbuing his voice with a damaging mixture of naivete and disdain. But for him, as for Sampson, transition can be rewarding, as when he breaks free both of simplistic rhyme and of heavily cloaked references. Representing as much as exploring the fragmented nature of humanity's traces, his final poem, The Enlightened Cave, achieves this much.
Belinda McKeon is a journalist and critic
The Distance Between Us By Fiona Sampson Seren, 72pp. £7.99 Poems 2000-2005 By Hugh Maxton Carysfort Press, 106pp. €10