For My Father, Falling Asleep at Saint Mary’s Hospital

The impending death of his elderly father leads the narrator of this book-length poem back to the particular mystery of the sacramental self, the terror and the necessity of bearing witness. Walking emotionally exposed through the landscape of his father’s slow decline, his loneliness and the environment that surrounds him, Sampson reveals the experience of a son accompanying his father to the doors of death.

Sampson’s poems balance a line between an awareness of evil—a sense of overcrowding, futility—and the promise of the dawn. These powerful eulogies testify that the courage to die is matched only by the courage to remain with the dying.