Coleshill

Coleshill finds Fiona Sampson enduring a term of trial, its rural setting made menacing by present threat, old terrors and the larger unravelling of the environment

Sean O'Brien, Independent

This is Sampson's poetic masterpiece, and a landmark book. She creates intimacy of place through a chamber music of the natural and made worlds, honed observations and epiphanic ‘instrusions’. With its layering of history and presence, Coleshill is a major contribution to the literature of the local.

John Kinsella

These poems of place, often troublingly dark, are sui generis in the way they use what's to hand to explore what's hidden. Fiona Sampson's technical subtlety is everywhere in evidence and her emotional range is startling. Coleshill is a book of rare power and depth.

David Harsent

A genuinely through-composed work, one poem opening secretly into another as the imagination endures a period of threat, when the reasonable assurances of ordinary civil life are removed by a sense that anything might happen, or that it already is happening. Given the material, the poet's touch is miraculously light.

John Burnside, Guardian

A richly rewarding and thematically coherent work, written with an avid attention to light effects, atmosphere, and the natural world.

Suzi Feay, Independent on Sunday

In this sumptuous collection, haunted by fear and a surefooted, hard-won joy, Fiona Sampson celebrates that elusive and most endangered thing: a meaningful sense of place. Reading Coleshill, we are reminded of an essential community with the land, and with all our good neighbours, animals and humans

John Burnside