Fiona Sampson, The Catch.: 'Sunny side up, with toothache', book review

This book is much sunnier and, true to a poet who’s always inventive with form, there’s a new diction and strategy in place

This new collection is self-described as a “happy book”, but you go to Fiona Sampson for intensity, and The Catch doesn’t disappoint. Her last, Coleshill, was a “dark book” in which, she told me, “every word is a thorn or a shard of glass”.

This is much sunnier and, true to a poet who’s always inventive with form, there’s a new diction and strategy in place. Short lines, enjambment and lack of punctuation necessitate decoding, yet simplicity of language, if not of thought, is always the goal here.

The book begins with waking and ends with a vision of evening when children are put to bed:

“each night / shadows met / across the grass // each night they met / to swallow time”. Sandwiched between are dreams, visions and more shadows; not sinister ones, but traces of the numinous.

In “Noli Me Tangere”, the poet describes “wanting to touch / something that’s shifting / out of sight / even as you / recognise it”, something akin to “a shadow / passing through / the pattern where things / stand and wait”.

There are grounding touches of the homely. In “Stucco”:

“a bright patch of wall” becomes a portal: “the light on the yellow wall is a voice / speaking to you quite distinctly”.

Despite the biblical echo of “Daily Bread” there is “no trumpet no voice of God”, and yet “small things reveal to you / how you’re alive and how you live”, and underneath everyday life is a “word … waiting to be spoken you can’t /quite make it out what is it”.

When describing states of infinite delicacy, Sampson risks saying too little rather than pouring words over like honey. Some of the poems are so evanescent that, like the states they describe, they float away almost as soon as perceived.

Others are almost too down to earth. Sampson creates spiritual agony out of toothache in “Caries” and “Abscess”: “This is the raging stranger / in your mouth this / is the tongue as flaming sword … the wild bacteria / are here to force a home // in your cheek and jaw”.

It helps to keep a straight face at such moments, like Sylvia Plath turning cooking the Sunday roast into a vision of the heart of darkness.

Bouncing through the pages like protective spirits are friendly dogs, although even the amiable black lurcher has “the smell of blood /always in her muzzle”. The collection is intricately constructed, with loose pairs of poems facing and commenting on each other.

“Really what I want / is to return / again and again / to a source / that’s inexhaustible / and daily” – Sampson manages that here.

The Catch, by Fiona Sampson. Chatto & Windus £10