Saturday 30 August 2008

Everything Talks: New Zealand poet Sam Sampson

I've just finished reading Sam Sampson's first full-length collection, Everything Talks, published simultaneously by Auckland University Press and Shearsman Books. I can't think of another poet who writes quite like he does, with the facility and assurance of the poems' address; the ability to bring different registers into collision in a way that reinforces the lyric when it reemerges; the poems' nuanced appreciation of the natural world simultaneous with cultural intelligence, his use of ellipticism interleaving the two effortlessly. Given the use of staggered lines across the page, I can't reproduce any of the poems here, but three poems from Everything Talks appear in Jacket 33 and can be read here and the book's Shearsman page (with links to places to buy it) is here. Do try.

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