Pratik : PRATIK SPRING 2021 HIGHLIGHT: SVETLANA LAVOCHKINA reviews FIONA SAMPSON's new book, "Come Down"

Book Review

SVETLANA LAVOCHKINA

The flow of

a huge narrative river

I met Fiona Sampson through my collaboration in POEM, a literary journal focused on international poetry which she founded and edited. Right after, I became familiar with her multiple-layered oeuvre. Ever since, I’ve become an ardent admirer of Fiona Sampson’s work. I eagerly awaited her fresh book each year. In return, I’ve been duly thrilled by the intensity in her works repeatedly.

In this sense, Sampson’s most recent collection of poems, Come Down (2019) too came as a bliss to me. The poet here walks on a very thin line between tangibility of the real and the subliminal. The book possesses the impeccability of a violin virtuoso and compassion of a family doctor.

Home and displacement, sonority and muteness, pain and bliss – with a tender yet assertive hand, Sampson directs the reader into a restless infinity, freeing them from the post-industrial world of falsehood. She strips her artistic subjects down to the incorruptible essence that we deeply retain within our ancient core. Sampson’s poetry embraces the tradition of Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and, Emily Dickinson – all adroitly transformed into the material and spiritual framework of the 21st century.

In addition, I’ve never encountered another poet who has been able to reconcile the feral with the spiritual. Fiona Sampson’s verse is highly powered, and of all the elements, specifically by water – the flow of a huge narrative river, nearly free from interpunction (commas, dashes, full stops etc.). The river is chilling to the freezing-point, as evident in the opening poem, eponymous to the book title (“through water cold enough/to drown you”), and at the same time, a tempestuous waterfall as I see it in “Modern Prometheus”:

he wake alone in the lab

to night noises breath roaring like a machine

and through all degrees of tepidity and warmth.

I was especially moved by “Mother as Eurydice”, which turns the famous myth to sparkle with multiple levels of implications, usually hidden.

In her title poem “Come Down,” Fiona Sampson follows in her immigrant ancestors’ footsteps. In a sentient way, she repeats their journey of loss, anchoring, arduous mastery of a new language. Birth and bereavement recur along with an awed awakening, merging into “Surfacing”, where the poet’s river flows into the ocean of world poetry:

At last you climb

out of the dream

as if from a dark valley

into light

letting all that was

uncertain come

clear on that high

pasture as each

preconception

melts in day-

light like shadows

do streaming

away under

the ragged thorns

was it this

woke you made you

clamber out

of yourself

little bare

creature from your

sleeping self?

The highest praise for a poet is when the review won’t come out in prose. On reading Come Down, I sat down to write my own poem. The name beads, traditionally and indestructibly, join each other, in three-dimensional, intricate molecular ties. Sampson’s one hand comes out to touch John Davidson, Forugh Farrokhzad, Mary Shelley and John Keats, while the hand reaches out to the readers in an ecstatic, egalitarian invitation to co-create and commingle with a grander notion of the Muse.

A wound delivered by Manticore’s claw can fester,

unless promptly disinfected.

You think you have paper in your hands, but, before long,

you realize the pages are of salty water, your saline solution.

Not surprisingly –

remember that water sustains names writ in it.

The hardest the verse gets is dough: softly malleable,

no or almost no recipe.

Just “whip up with salty wind”.

Bake the puff pastry of your own

at 200 degrees Celcius of (re)cognition.

But if you look at the snakes of these lines –

verse like a piece of bunting

stitches the sail’s tarpaulin skirt innuminous folds.

Flashes of knowledge that is your own but can’t be,

having been pre-baked in her kiln.

Looked up Page 9, asking the Web about

“Lady of the Sea” and got exactly

the stone white bride of Copenhagen, that was easy;

more challenge with the black and blue Virgin –

the closest I could get was Guadalupe’s

Mary with folded hands but no palanquin.

I know though that we are not meant

to dig that literally, to the grit, to the antipodes.

Rather, in our own grey matter

to grow feelers on our fingertips.

Some of the riddles persist as sediment – tartar,

whether raw ground meat or plaque,

this is up to the chewer,

she might know the exact solution, or someone close to her pantry.

For us, might will reach an even harsher degree of uncertainty,

non-existent in English.

The stanzas are knapped into Prometheus’ lungs,

Mousterian Levallois technique,

with Mary’s vegetarian hand.

Sea spreads its water-legs in a shed. Come comb!

Eurydice can perform her leave from any longitude of kinship;

the tiny sprinkle of Old Man’s seed, a seizure catching you unawares,

a shockdrop of tabasco in the temperate tenderness of the soup –

– another drop – and the meal is inedible –

but she knows her measure, the drop will stay a shock –

homeopathic.

This is how a different smell, a different pool of tears,

pool of genes, forces you to bake your own impromptu puff pastry,

huffed and dishevelled.

This is why calm down. Come. Come down.

Merriam Webster gives seven meanings for the phrasal verb;

Longman also seven.

Cambridge Dictionary gives ten:

a help and a riddle at once, two sides of a coin,

to poetic immigrants and expats,

our ancestors and descendants.

Come Down: Poems

Fiona Sampson

Corsair , 2020, $ 15.60

Svetlana Lavochkina is a Ukrainian-born novelist, poet and translator, residing in Germany. Her work has been widely published in the US and Europe, appearing in AGNI, New Humanist, POEM, Witness, Straylight, Circumference, Superstition Review, Sixfold, Drunken Boat and elsewhere. In 2013, her novella Dam Duchess was chosen as runner-up in the Paris Literary Prize. Her debut novel Zap was shortlisted for the Tibor & Jones Pageturner Prize 2015. Both novels were published by Whisk(e)y Tit, NYC, in 2017 and 2018. Her translations of Ukrainian poetry were published in Words for War and The White Chalk of Days by Academic Studies, Boston and by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. She lives in Leipzig with her husband and two sons. She teaches English at a Waldorf school and is a literary columnist for LeipGlo, a Leipzig-based international English-language magazine.

Pratik now on available on Amazon USA, Canada, UK and India