Reviews : Comments : News
DUETS Launch & Reading, Monday July 12, 2010, 6pm, Wellington. Bill Manhire will launch DUETS - a series of chapbooks that pairs poets from New Zealand and the United States.. Read More...
Sam Sampson: Auckland Writers & Readers Festival, May 12 - 16, 2010. Read More...
'The New Zealand-based poet Sam Sampson's Everything Talks is a remarkably smart and engaging first book, in its engagement of the European poetic tradition with an antipodal frame of reference.' (Jason B. Jones, Bookslut, February 25, 2010). Read More...
2009 NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award for Poetry Winner (Montana NZ Book Awards, July 27, 2009). Read More...
'His is a poetry of pauses, turns, leaps and dives. It's all about where the stress falls, the music of verbal cadences, the weave of sonic counterpoint. He returns poetry to its primal function as ecstatic utterance: words are miraculous things, rich in resonances and echoes.' (David Eggleton, NZ Listener, 'Avoiding the plain language loop', July 25 - 31, 2009). Read More...
'Language blossoms, through the wondering ear, from word into world. Sampson's poems achieve these transformations, variously, through open-field composition, formal constraints, collage, and "listing" that allows us to reach where "likeness swirls"...' (Zach Savich, The Kenyon Review, 'The Pursuit of What Exists', June, 2009). Read More...
'These are works that attempt, in their construction, to capture as much condensation of image and nuance of feeling as possible; fleshy but pared down to the bone. Sometimes this cryptic reductionism provides intense visions. At other times we are left staring at skeletons...' (Peter Dornauf, Waikato Times, 'Sampson's poems find rhythm in sea', April 6, 2009).
'Sampson's poetry repeatedly makes such demands on the reader: to attend to the slightest difference in emphasis a vowel can imply; to attend carefully to each line, or to each couplet in a ghazal; to see the linguistic and phenomenological connections; to expand one's senses of where the boundary between self and other, plenitude and zero, beauty and bathos is situated...' (Helen Dennis, The Warwick Review, 'On NZ Poetry', March, 2009). Read More... Download Pdf.
'One of the most intellectually charged recent poetry publications is Sam Sampson’s Everything Talks...' (Gregory O'Brien, NZ Listener, 'Marketplace or Laboratory?', August 30-September 5, 2008). Read More...
'...wanting to thank you again for Everything Talks. It does, certainly, in this instance; the work is a pleasure to experience all the way through. I was moved as well to see that entirely pertinent epigraph from Sobin's "Breath's Reflections."' (Michael Palmer, August 12, 2008).
'I can't think of another poet who writes quite like he does...' (Carrie Etter: Poet, Teacher & Critic). Read More...