Tessitura

Tessitura, Italian 'texture', borrows a musical conceptual term, denoting the textural sweep of melodic contour-kind of safe-space-for a singer or instrumentalist. This collection is intended as a corresponding writerly-space in which I bring together various drifts of work, assemble them into poetry's visual equivalence of music's soundscape. The poems are grounded-and sometimes take flight from-my comfort-zone roots in the South-West of England-its continuity of personal ancestors and especially its successive memory chain of often forgotten women writers, several of whom make their presence known in the central sequence 'Devon women; Lost W/rites'.

Julie Sampson grew up in mid Devon in the home and idyllic garden created by her grandfather - a stone's throw from the slopes of Dartmoor's Cawsand (Cosdon) Beacon; her roots and dreams are still sited there. Now working as independent researcher, she trained as musician/teacher and later achieved a PhD on the subject of the American writer, H.D., at the University of Exeter. She taught music, then creative writing, at various colleges in the Southwest and was a visiting lecturer in English at the University of the West of England. She's always written and her poems have appeared in a variety of magazines, anthologies and online. Her work was included in Making Worlds; One Hundred Contemporary Women Poets, 2003, eds. Myra Schneider, Dilys Wood and Gladys Mary Coles. In 1999 one of her poems was runner-up in the Exeter Poetry Prize. More recently she's focused her research on women writers from the Southwest, especially from Devon; papers on the C16 Anne Dowriche have been published in Transactions of the Devonshire Association;an essay on H.D. in Devon appeared on the HD's Web newsletter; her edition of Lady Mary Chudleigh's Selected Poems was published by Shearsman, in 2009.