At first sight, the cover of Peter Sansom’s sixth collection, Be Careful What You Wish For, and the poem to which it refers, ‘Lava Lamp’ – a concrete poem simulating, as the poet puts it, the ‘soun dl ess gloo b le/ and gl oop’ of the lamps’ shape-shifting contents – are experimentally atypical of the vast bulk of the poems which are mostly left-justified, elegiac and elegant laments for a Yorkshire-Derbyshire of the early Seventies’ and Eighties’, now a world long lost, or only envisioned in glimpses by the poet. But Time is not linear, of course, and like the ‘lava’, curls in and around itself, re-making shapes in the here and now even as they register, shifting on to other forms; continuously changing like the time-frames in the poems, almost imperceptibly, until the poet zooms out and realises forty years have elapsed.
The first poem in the collection, ‘Diary of a Night in Matlock Bath’ sets-up this play with time: ‘A huge willow/grows back into the current I rowboated on/one summer forty years ago, impossible/ the glass drop on the oar plunged back/into the heavy green present, this moment, when a Dalmatian comes startling by…All this wildlife. All these goings-on.’ Personal recollection and society’s upheavals, culture and reminiscence, history and nostalgia, collide and interact: ‘white chimneys and pantile roofs/are more than the moment, more than just here.’
And always literature, specifically poetry, representing the solace of continuity, of a way of learning about these parallel, shifting worlds. This being the Peak District, the Romantic poets are name-checked, as well as artists like Landseer and Hockney. There’s subtler poetic references to his ‘curious face in a convex mirror,’ and when his memory threatens ‘a sort of nostalgia’ he Robert Frosts it and ‘takes the other way.’ Time, though, like a Mobius Strip, is both continuous and looping back on itself: ‘I stand changed by what has changed’ yet,’ I walk on in myself to walk/back to where I stood,’ and at the denouement, ‘it’s night/all of a sudden back where I set off.’ Even the time and histories of those he’s never met preoccupy the poet, with ‘trains beguiling as always/when you’re not on them.’
The collection is book-ended. ‘Diary’ comes at the beginning but ends on an equally long, four-page poem, called ‘Sofa.’ This poem is sometimes addressed directly to a personified sofa, and sometimes becomes a paean to the sofa, or series of sofas, that have marked periods of the poet’s life, ‘Dear Sofa, retreat/and dog-house in living memory.’ And ‘Dear Sofa, when did you stop being a settee?’ This last poem seems a valedictory ode to a life that is aware of encroaching old-age, (there is an unspecified medical diagnosis alluded to earlier) and could slip into sentimentality in other hands. Sansom skillfully ensures the humour grounds it and that wry experience triumphs over the temptation toward some saggy-bottomed sofa-philosophising, instead finishing off, where the collection began, with books, history, culture. Books ‘some I’ve never opened and not one of them in years,/ and I’m not going to start again now. Here, and elsewhere, Sansom is at his best undercutting emotional pathos with a Yorkshire throwaway humour or use of the vernacular, typified by those poems that close the first section.
A poem about a much-loved old ‘A Straw Hat’ could fall into the man-traps of the saccharine which Sansom sets himself in ‘Sofa’, but he redeems it with the exactitude of his description, the apparent simplicity of his images (‘It bobs like a cork in the past/and present world,’) and the self-deprecatory wryness and heartfelt emotion of the final lines, ‘love of my life, light of my life willing/to walk me even in a hat like this.’
‘Autumn Term’ recalls a visit to an old primary school with an equally droll eye for the slightly absurd. ‘Instead of Going to Work’ reminded me of Simon Armitage’s ‘Hercules’, about a man evading household-chores (Sansom was one of the first to publish Armitage, back in the 80s, so this may be more than just a coincidence.) And the hearbreak of a rather feckless male in a break-up carries this mix of ‘high culture’ – he’s trying to read Finnegans Wake (slowly) – and the ordinary, as the kids are ‘perfecting the Ben & Jerry’s/Diet Coke Facebook diet.’ Yet he manages to genuinely move us when he steps out from his wryness to deliver the final lines of: ‘Wherever you are, wherever you have to go,/with your losses, I am lost too/and the world is an endless book./Please come home.’