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JanuaryPeter Sansom![]()
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Paperback (64 pages) (Pub. Mar 1997) 9781857540864 Out of Stock
You stand at the door (you sometimes are
the door) and, according to tradition, look to the past year as well as to the new...
Peter Sansom's Everything You've Heard is True (Poetry Book Society Recommendation, 1990) was a notable début. The Times declared the poems on his Nottinghamshire childhood 'as good as Tony Harrison's adventures in a similar vein', celebrating 'a promising and unpretentious start'. In the Guardian, Carol Ann Duffy noted his 'mature assurance'. 'His poems are witty, realistic and imaginative,' said Peter Porter (Observer). 'Auden, Haydn and Uccello live in his pages as happily as snooker stars, Tesco and Extra Strong Mints'.
January is more ambitious. The surrealism of daily life lived inventively and cheerfully at or near the edge comes into its own. Sansom, a voracious reader, has learned his own lessons from the New York School, eastern Europe and his contemporaries. Playfulness is now more serious, though no less amusing, than before. There's candour in his confessions, and a novel particularity in his evocations of Yorkshire town-scapes. The characters that speak in his poems have real voices, complex representative hearts.
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 'Personal, political, powerful' Morning Star |
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