Book description
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.
'...this selection ought to establish Sansom as one of the most
important poets of his generation. He can be as deadpan as Geoff
Hattersley, as breezy as Simon Armitage and as surreal as Ian McMillan,
moving suddenly and effectively from the familial to the international.'
- Andy Croft, The Morning Star, 9 December 2010
Peter Sansom was
born in 1958 in Nottinghamshire. For ten years Peter taught the MA
Poetry at Huddersfield University, and more recently he was Fellow in
Creative Writing at Leeds University. He is currently Company Poet
with Prudential. He is also a director with Ann Sansom of the Poetry
Business in Sheffield, where they edit The North magazine and
Smith/Doorstop Books.
His influential book, Writing Poems, is published by Bloodaxe
(1994). Carcanet publish his four previous collections: Everything
You've Heard is True, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation (1990),
January (1994), for which he received an Arts Council Writer's Bursary
and an award from the Society of Authors, Point of Sale (2000) and The
Last Place on Earth (2006). His books have earned admiring reviews and
a loyal following. He is married to the poet, Ann Sansom and has four
children. He has had a number of jobs: as writer-in-residence with
Marks and Spencer, for instance, and as Guest Poet at The Times
Educational Supplement, in addition to writing radio plays.
