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Careful What You Wish For

Peter Sansom

Cover of Careful What You Wish For by Peter Sansom
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Categories: 21st Century, British, Humour
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (64 pages)
(Pub. Jun 2015)
9781847772039
£9.99 £8.99
eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Jan 2015)
9781784100308
£9.99 £8.99
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  • Description
  • Author
  • Reviews
  • 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 come-back in golf history, as told by the caddy. ‘Entertaining and frequently something more’, Carol Ann Duffy said of Sansom’s first book. This sixth Carcanet collection is clear-eyed, tender, and just as bewildered by what life is and does.

    Peter Sansom was born in 1958 in Nottinghamshire. Carcanet published his first book in 1990. Among more recent titles are Selected Poems and Careful What You Wish For, which won him a Cholmondeley Award in 2016. He has also published Writing Poems (Bloodaxe, 1994, new edition 2024). For ten years ... read more
    'Personal, political, powerful'
    Morning Star 
    Praise for Peter Sansom  'Long-suppressed anger morphs into characteristic deadpan humour, a difficult trick to accomplish without appearing trite - while he's no formalist, Sansom is as highly-skilled as any contemporary poet. Peter Sansom's poetry... is full of gentle, bittersweet and funny moments, the work of a poet and person whose outlook on life is immensely engaging, engaged and likeable.'

    Matthew Paul, The Friday Poem

    'A serious intelligence only lightly disguised as self-mockery and expressed via devastatingly clear-sighted observation.'
    Yorkshire Post
    'His writing gains its vitality from the tension between the desire to remember and the necessity of moving on.'
    Poetry Review
    'A congenial writer, whose usually informal metrical sense is, nevertheless, decisive and intuitively informed.'
    Times Literary Supplement
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Cover of Selected Poems
Selected Poems Peter Sansom
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