Fiona Sampson – Favourite Things

Each week Reaction Weekend brings you Favourite Things – interviews with interesting people about the skills, hobbies, pleasures and past times that make them who they are.

Fiona Sampson MBE is a British poet and writer; her work has been published in 37 languages. She was previously the editor of Poetry Review and founded Poem in 2013, a quarterly international review published by the University of Roehampton, where Sampson is a professor of poetry.

These are a few of her favourite things…

Romanesque carving

I’ve always been interested in buildings – I love they ways they choreograph space and time – and particularly in churches. Which comprise a collage of revisions and successive modernisations: you can tell a lot about society and how it changes from church buildings. They’re beautiful, incredible works of art, available for free.

Romanesque sculpture is particularly astonishing. Before Brexit made it impossible, I lived briefly in Périgord, a French region with much Cluniac Romanesque church carving. Romanesque is chunky, chthonic. It seems to engage with the nature of stone itself, rather than transcending that nature as the later Gothic does. Its iconography is partly lost to us, unorthodox in what it has assimilated, and so mysterious. When we moved back to England we discovered ourselves living in another concentration of Romanesque work by the Herefordshire School.

AFL Football

I’m married to an Australian, so I’ve been tutored in the joys of Aussie Rules Football. The first time I watched the footie I thought, this is just complete chaos! But once you get your eye in and know the rules you see instead how incredible the athleticism is. An AFL pitch is enormous: each player can run about 30km in a match. They kick giant distances, kick while running, leap on each other shoulders to “take a mark” (catch the ball). Strength combined an almost balletic grace, courage and grit.

Trees 

We have a small copse. I like working with the trees, spending time among them and getting to know how they’re growing – which direction and why – and how they change and whether they’re thriving.

I’m forever planting apple trees. I do it wherever I live. I think planting trees is one of the small good things we can do, especially if we have a patch of garden. And apple trees are good for even the smallest of patches. As well as saving the world and looking terrific they even provide fruit – what could be better?

Apples are symbolic and I like things that are both part of the concrete ordinary world, and fat with symbol.

Long distance trains 

For years I’ve done most of my international travel by train. Of course, you can’t change hemispheres by surface travel unless you have months to spare and can take a slow boat or two. But I’ll happily spend a couple of nights on a train to Oslo, or Kyiv. Not only are you saving the planet: by train you also see so much more of how one country relates to the next, and how a capital city arises from the country it serves. Flying means teleporting into a contextless destination: you arrive with no idea of the rest of the country in which your destination sits.

I work well on trains. I like people-watching on board. I enjoy being out of touch with the dutiful world for a day or two; the motion and the rhythm of the travel; daydreaming out the window at the filmstrip of passing country. I especially love sleeper trains. Whether it’s Munich or Milan, Budapest or Warsaw, there’s something about arriving at a station when all of the night trains are ready at their platforms. A sense of expectation. It’s hushed, dimly-lit. Often cold. People stand around on those continental low platforms smoking, collars up, waiting out the goodbyes… Then there’s the pleasure of seeking out your compartment and the moment when the train just shifts – and you know you’re off.

The Balkans 

 I do a lot of work in the Balkans. I always travel there by train (of course). And Balkan trains are still mostly slow. You might sail through Paris, Vienna and Budapest; then you get to the Serbian border – Subotica – and the express becomes a stopping train. Suddenly, old ladies in headscarves hail it and board with their baskets, back from taking their produce to market. Or schoolkids get on at one village in the middle of nowhere, in a Transylvanian or Banat landscape that could be three centuries ago – shout, giggle, play with their phones – and get off at another a few minutes later.

I’ve been going to South East Europe since the end of the Nineties. Despite their complex and tragic history, these countries can be joyous. These southern cities have a great outdoor culture too, drinks and coffee on the terrace, people strolling the evening streets. I like the way that poetry is relatively culturally central; here in the UK poetry often feels like talking to yourself. I like the traditional music, with the five-beat, seven-beat off-step rhythms I first got to know through Modernist composers like Bartok and Kodaly. (We can ignore the misappropriations by turbo-folk.) I also love the social culture of straight-forward address. Unlike the shadow-play of English manners, you know when people from this region are annoyed with you – and also when they like you.