This brilliantly devised verse-novel opens with a love affair in crisis, unfolds through loss, risk and existential challenge, and ends with lovemaking in a domain at once sensual and imagined. Such radical ambiguity invites us to experience the lovers’ dilemmas as our own: is true intimacy only possible through distance? How much of our identity is just story?

Exploring the limits of meaning, Sampson refreshes our sense of poetry as that which goes beyond the grammar of the commonplace. Profoundly influenced by the poet’s work in the mainstream of European poetry, The Distance Between Us is a passionate exploration of psychology and sexuality set among the tensions of contemporary European identity.

Fiona Sampson has published ten books, including four collections of poetry, philosophy of language and books on the writing process. She has won many awards and been translated into more than a dozen languages.

“Superb. Perfectly balancing remoter imaginative and intellectual perspectives with a richness of earthy, ordinary detail.” Poetry Review 

“These poems are liguistic tours de force [which] point up the extraordinary versatility of Sampson’s language.” Poetry London