Careful What You Wish For

Overview

A night in Matlock Bath, an Ode to Indolence, a boy running the ploughed fields of cross-country, and the 1975 Reading Festival, Careful What You Wish For is winter mornings lit by the tame volcano of a lava lamp, and it is Camus, St-Exupéry, and Ken Dodd. Also it is Robert Lowell in a canal boat just outside Mirfield, not to mention family poems and love and tennis poems, and the biggest comeback in golf history—as told by the caddy. Peter Sansom's latest collection is clear-eyed, tender, and full of bewilderment by what life is and does.

Reviews

"Witty, realistic and imaginative. Auden, Haydn and Uccello live in his pages as happily as snooker stars, Tesco and Extra Strong Mints."  —Observer

"A congenial writer, whose usually informal metrical sense is, nevertheless, decisive and intuitively informed."  —Times Literary Supplement

"His writing gains its vitality from the tension between the desire to remember and the necessity of moving on."  —Poetry Review

Author Biography

Peter Sansom is the director of the Poetry Business and the editor of the North Magazine and Smith/Doorstop Books. He is the author of Everything You've Heard is True, January, Point of Sale, and The Last Place on Earth, and the recipient of the Arts Council Literature Award. He has contributed poems to a number of publications, including the Guardian and the Observer.