From design to bottled water;
from projected sales to the very last word
in socks. Lighting and furnishings (mail order),
from catalogue to juggernaut, from contractor
to the hydraulics in a loading bay,
the seasons are told in word and picture,
the weeks in tone and colour,
the days in weight and texture.

There's more, but what I remember's
the sliced, the caged, the stands and clips,
St Michael's Gold,
not the falling profits and falling shares
or the heads that rolled.


from 'Sheffield Far Gate'
           

Peter Sansom was the Marks and Spencer Poet in Residence during 1999. Point of Sale includes his poetic 'diary' of that year, alongside other poems which cover the spectrum of family experience from young babies learning to speak ('Oh, Fuck') to the death of a parent ('Your dad died convinced you were his dad'). The personal and the public, his family and the demands made on him by the literature industry, combine in poems of wit and subtlety. He moves from free verse into rhyme and out again with ease, his vision of the world, its absurdity and evanescent tragedy, is always clear in focus. As Carol Ann Duffy wrote in the Guardian, Sansom 'has a mature assurance which results in poems that are always entertaining and frequently something more'.