My Big Brother Is in Heaven Now: An Inspiring Story of Life, Love and Grief Through The Eyes of a Child, Sampson J. L., Coleman J. Omar

The idiosyncrasy of this study comes about by the ways in which a formidable consideration of Sampson's other roles as editor, translator, healer, educator, critic, and biographer in the world of letters can be understood as complementary parts of her predominant, first, poetic mйtier. In this sense, the book itself has a poetic function though written in clear discursive prose. Its aim is to see and make its readership see how all of Professor Sampson's flourishing roles in the literary world grow out of and into her primary role as a creative writer. The study finds felicitous and innovative ways of showing how the work of an editor, a critic or theorist might be fruitfully seen as vehicles for the major poetic tenor. Thus, the central critical trope of this study shows how and why the variegated oeuvre to date is organically rooted in and connected into and out of one thoroughgoing literary intelligence and vision. All the readings and chapters cohere in a way to display the oneness of the oeuvre and career but, more pressingly, to show the readership how such oneness might be usefully understood.

A lucid, coherent and compelling reading of Sampson's main works makes this book a scintillating study and a much needed contribution to the current work being done on major contemporary poets and writers and, in particular, contemporary women figures, in the British and international literary scenes.