This booklength study of an eminent, distinguished and influential poet and contemporary woman of letters integrates analysis and a honed interpretation of the neartotal gamut of the oeuvre todate of Professor Fiona Sampson. The study includes biographical insight and synthesizes its rigorous discussions of the dominant rubric of Professor Sampsons poetic metier, her prose in different genres, and the literary practices of over a decadeslong and muchlauded literary career. This critical work finds and displays incisive and fruitful ways by which the oeuvre in question crosses boundaries in literary writing and practices with fertile results and evidences those crosscurrents in a manner that indicates the trajectory of a sensibility or structure of feeling, one which though highly intelligent and selfaware is also deeply empathic. A lucid, coherent and compelling reading of Sampsons main works makes this book a scintillating study and a much needed contribution to the current work being done on major contemporary poets and writers and, in particular, contemporary women figures, in the British and international literary scenes. | Omar Sabbagh Reading Fiona Sampson : A Study in Contemporary Poetry & Poetics