The painter’s chair / Attending by Fiona Sampson

The painter’s chair

i

One lying
over another
blue  white
grey  green
and the astounding
yellow strand

like a new
thought or like
the curlew’s
call that
doublejoints
across the Sound

ii

between water
and sand (and
both seem
mild as if
they mean kindness)

you see
green weed
shells and stones
a whited crab
and hanging

like a dream
Aurelia
aureta
silently
arow

so the whole
shallow wave
becomes its clear-
skirted
tentacle

iii

in the studio
a sweater
thrown across
an empty chair

looks like
the kind of story
you enter
in medias res

wanting both
to pick it up
(sweater and story)
and leave it

how it fell
as if that
were a print
of someone

who just this minute
left the room
but in
the story’s logic

will turn out
to matter
to you
anyway

iv

bullfinch
on a thistle
swaying
gorger

bright colour-
spot for
seconds before
he lifts

away and gone
obliges you
with his plumage’s
exact

design and
the line of
flight he
takes with him

v

of course you hope
to do
more than simply
lift an image
from world
as if from
the inked plate

but do you change
what you see
in seeing
or must you pause
and rearrange it
as if world
lacks pattern

or as if
that pattern is
so evident
it’s not enough
simply to
copy–
you must divine

form inside
the form you glimpse
like the light
inside
every colour
that you see
and won’t print

*

Attending

Pietr de Hooch

The Dutch painters of the Golden Age – Rembrandt van Rijn and Jan Lievens, Johannes Vermeer and Gerard ter Borch – showed life comes closest to us not in swirling battle scenes or mythic tableau, but in the lived detail of the quotidian. Clean, tenderly traced stonework in Pietr Saenredam’s views of the Utrecht Mariakerk, sunlight from an open window to bleach a claytiled interior by Pietr de Hooch, the caterpillar-eaten lace leaf in one of Rachel Ruysch’s flower paintings: each of these glows with a feeling that rightness and revelation are at hand.

We look back across nearly four centuries to such paintings, but they offer us no window into history. Experience is our truth, they seem to gesture. Keep the faith.

Yet they’re as much compositions as the blowsy goddesses or corrupted cupids Caravaggio and Nicholas Poussin were painting at the same time. The seventeenth century was a period of warfare and imperial expansion, plague and poverty. To turn so resolutely towards the modest and familiar must have been less quietism than an act of resistance. These aren’t just things but values, the paintings say, balancing a bowl of strained milk or a potted geranium on their unsteady zeitgeist.

***

This work is taken from Fiona Sampson’s forthcoming collection, Still Lake with Carp. Her latest collection, Come Down (Hachette, 2021) received the European Lyric Atlas, the Naim Frasheri and the Wales Book of the Year (Poetry) prizes.

Fiona Sampson MBE FRSL, is a poet and writer whose work has been translated into 37 languages, and who has received a number of national and international prizes for her writing. She lives on an old farm in Herefordshire. She is the author of Limestone Country, out now in a new paperback edition.

The photograph at the head of this work is by the author.