Everything Talks

NZSA BEST FIRST BOOK OF POETRY 2009

Everything Talks - Sam Sampson

Auckland University Press, ISBN 978-1-86940-411-6, $24.99 pbk

If the poems in this collection by Sam Sampson are mysterious, they are also as true to immediate fact – informed by a particularly New Zealand nostalgia and sense of loss – as the poet can make them. In these poems of history and geography, of ships and sky, of flotsam and jetsam in an imaginary sea, many different voices may be heard . . . everything talks.

Sam Sampson was born in Auckland, New Zealand, and grew up next to Muddy Creek in South Titirangi, on the West Coast of the North Island. He has an MA in Philosophy from The University of Auckland and for a number of years was a tutor in that university’s ethnomusicology programme. Alongside his writing he has held various other jobs including technician at a lost-wax foundry, truck driver, orchestral operations, musician and music reviewer.

He is the author of The Deep End (2006) and Poems (2006), both with artist Peter Madden, and two chapbooks, Encompassed (2003) and Gauguin’s Poiesis (1999). His poems have appeared in Landfall, Stand, Slope, Poetry Review, Salt, Jacket and Shearsman Magazine.