Selected Poems E-Book

Peter Sansom

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

Peter Sansom's Selected Poems brings together twenty years of quintessential Sansom, a poet who has made the local and familiar his own resonant territory. Supermarkets and darts matches, life with teenagers and family funerals, the common ground of modern life, make up the fabric of poems that capture the distinctiveness of the ordinary with a robust and sharp-eyed tenderness. Selected Poems includes revised versions of poems from Peter Sansom's four Carcanet collections, with poems from his 2009 pamphlet The Night is Young.

Leseprobe

PETER SANSOM

Selected Poems

for Ann

Acknowledgements

Poems are taken from the following collections: Everything You’ve Heard Is True (Carcanet, 1990), January (Carcanet, 1994), Point of Sale (Carcanet, 2000) and The Last Place on Earth (Carcanet, 2006). Much of the earlier work has been revised, sometimes to the point of being new poems.

The new poems here appeared in Areté, Manchester Review, Poetry Review, Smiths Knoll and Stand, and in a Rialto Bridge pamphlet, The Night Is Young (The Rialto, 2009). Many thanks to the editors, and especially Michael Mackmin. I would also like to raise my hat to the other pamphlet editors who have published my work over the years, the late Stanley Cook back in 1984, and John Killick, Geoff Hattersley and John Harvey.

I am grateful for an award from the Royal Literature Fund, and for a Fellowship at the University of Manchester during which many of the new poems were written.

Poem

It was assembly and Kes, The Loneliness

of the Long Distance Runner; a window

onto winding gear at Teversall; and then

it was you

to contradict it with your glamour:

all public school and sixties London, you were

lessons outdoors one day-on-day of summer;

tennis after school and after tennis

the shower I watched you in; you were

the school play you wrote yourself

with me the lead. My writing took your slant,

your Greek e’s and buckled y’s.

You drove a minibus of us to France

and made ParadiseLost hilarious.

You were cynical and believed in us.

Then there was when it was just us,

the theatre or golf, jazz or Mozart round at yours,

and the afternoon you let me take the wheel

of your pride and joy

powder blue Volkswagen Beetle.

What you offered those days in good faith

has taken me this far, not far I know but far

for a boy going nowhere, till now

I have the means to write this at least – at last –

from wherever I am to wherever you are.

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

House

Snookered

Bingo

The Folklore of Plants

Vacuum

One Night

Funeral Morning

Living Room

5th September 1989, Small Hours

Language

The fox in the writing class

Agony

Borrowdale Morning

*

January

Lake

At Blea Tarn

A Stone in a Drystone Wall

A Walk

What the Eye Doesn’t See

A Dream Mistaking a Person for What He Has Come to Represent

Aldeburgh

Bliss

At the End of Here

Whitby

*

Sitcom

Some night by chance

Clinical Depression

Death Cap

Summer Evening

Baker Street: Poet in Residence (Day 1) 45

To Autumn

Words for Paul Cézanne

Top Withens

You’ll Like This

Beard

About Time

Teeth

My Mother on a Seat Outside a Hospital

*

Crich Stand

That was the day it snowed

Ted Savoury

Breakfast in the Dunblane Hilton

Anyone for Tennis?

Ironing

Sheffield by Night

On Not Being George W. Bush

L.O.V.E.

I’d heard about the man, who, drunk

On the Road

Born-again bikers,

The Wife of Bath’s Tale

Joss

Bluebell Wood

The Day He Met His Wife

*

Stepladder

My Brother’s Vespa

Autumn Term

Keymarkets

I used to faint

Moon

Petar K, 1957–2847

Croft Juniors

Instead of going to work

My Town

The Night is Young

Index of Titles and First Lines

About the Author

Also by Peter Sansom from Carcanet

Copyright

House

Half-three. Mum’s at bingo

so the house is quiet. Joss is asleep

with his hand covering his face

from the light or from view.

The clock ticks either side of his breathing.

There’s nothing in the paper

though the headline is ‘Fish for Free’.

The dolphin thermometer

from Marineland, Scarbrough, breaks surface

in the shine on top of the telly.

The fire’s built up but the room’s cold.

Out of the window is the weather.

Dad comes in from upstairs,

the blood on his collar

is where he’s been shaving

for tomorrow or the day after

if they haven’t a bed. ‘There’s Half-pint,’ he says,

‘back from the gardens.

Nice clump of beetroot that.’

He presses his hand against the glass

and I see us for a moment on the allotment,

my foot on the too-heavy spade

pushing into October soil.

‘I’ll be off then,’ I tell him,

‘take the barrow down for the winnings.’

Snookered

Dad nods in the straight chair and me and Mum

are down to shandy. It’s less and less likely

Jimmy White will stop Davies now. Midnight

when our Steve knocks, black from bagging up since dinner.

He’s brought another hundredweight. Davies

puts another frame away while me and Joss

help him get it in the coalhouse. He stops for a fag

and a can of mild, and laughs when Davies

misses a sitter. ‘Mr Interesting,’ he says.

It’s tense. Jimmy can’t let this one slip.

Next door’s phone goes – it should be disconnected

and when it stops I picture a white hand

lifting the receiver. We groan. Now Jimmy

needs snookers, and sure enough Davies sinks

the last red. Right, says Steve, but he sits back down

when the cue ball travels three angles to go

in off. ‘The start,’ he says ‘of the biggest comeback

since Lazarus.’ Nice, but we’ve heard it before,

and we’d have to see it to believe it.