Stella Sampson

Wear and Tear Stella Sampson

Stella Sampson's poems tell of a bygone age of 'making do' and 'putting by'. They reflect her ear for dialogue, a natural feeling for internal rhymes and rhythm, and an ability to conjure up vivid imagery and a profound empathy for life's fellow travellers. She had a natural affinity for society's lame ducks: individuals like herself replete with fears, foibles and frailties. Above all, and particularly in the poems when she wanted to conjure up pictures of life when she was happiest (her childhood, her time in Belfast, her early retirement in mid Wales), they could be funny. Only latterly, when her body started to break down and she seemed to turn her thoughts to the grave, did the humour take a back seat to her own brand of metaphysics and all her 'creatures of the dreadful dark'. The poems are grouped into three distinct categories: the halcyon days of her north London childhood, punctuated by summer holidays on the south Devon coast and symbolically terminated by the bombing of Exeter, where she and her parents moved to get away from the bombing of London; the unexpectedly rewarding days of tree-lined middle-class comfort in Belfast, where she raised her four children until the Troubles no doubt re-kindled old wartime traumas and ended her sojourn in a brave new world; and the long subsequent days of trying in vain to re-capture the happiness she had known, first in Bath and then in Builth Wells, Wales, and finally in the Southampton area. 'Hard times, ' as she wrote, 'beyond the borders of [her] amiable state.