The stationary train that pulls out of the station.
A harbour and island getting underway
across an estuary and out to open sea.
A church moving, as you walk, on the horizon.
The ceiling turning round a single, drunken
lightbulb; or from a spin in an office chair
watching the room like a rubber band unwind
to bring the world back to where you were.

from 'What the Eye Doesn't See'

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.

Cover painting: Mary Sansom (aged six)

Contents

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)    
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