{"id":6892,"date":"2016-11-24T16:03:34","date_gmt":"2016-11-24T15:03:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=6892"},"modified":"2016-12-01T17:14:24","modified_gmt":"2016-12-01T16:14:24","slug":"peter-sansom-careful-what-you-wish-for-carcanet-9-95-reviewed-by-ken-evans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=6892","title":{"rendered":"Peter Sansom, <em>Careful What You Wish For<\/em> (Carcanet, \u00a39.95), reviewed by Ken Evans"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At first sight, the cover of Peter Sansom\u2019s sixth collection, <em>Be Careful What You Wish For<\/em>, and the poem to which it refers, \u2018Lava Lamp\u2019 \u2013 a concrete poem simulating, as the poet puts it, the \u2018soun dl ess gloo b le\/ and gl oop\u2019 of the lamps\u2019 shape-shifting contents \u2013\u00a0 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\u2019 and Eighties\u2019, now a world long lost, or only envisioned in glimpses by the poet. \u00a0But Time is not linear, of course, and like the \u2018lava\u2019, 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.<\/p>\n<p>The first poem in the collection, \u2018Diary of a Night in Matlock Bath\u2019 sets-up this play with time: \u2018A 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\u2026All this wildlife. All these goings-on.\u2019 \u00a0Personal recollection and society\u2019s upheavals, culture and reminiscence, history and nostalgia, collide and interact: \u2018white chimneys and pantile roofs\/are more than the moment, more than just here.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s subtler poetic references to his \u2018curious face in a convex mirror,\u2019 and when his memory threatens \u2018a sort of nostalgia\u2019 he Robert Frosts it and \u2018takes the other way.\u2019 \u00a0Time, though, like a Mobius Strip, is both continuous and looping back on itself: \u2018I stand changed by what has changed\u2019 yet,\u2019 I walk on in myself to walk\/back to where I stood,\u2019 and at the denouement, \u2018it\u2019s night\/all of a sudden back where I set off.\u2019\u00a0 Even the time and histories of those he\u2019s never met preoccupy the poet, with \u2018trains beguiling as always\/when you\u2019re not on them.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>The collection is <em>book<\/em>-ended. \u2018Diary\u2019 comes at the beginning but ends on an equally long, four-page poem, called \u2018Sofa.\u2019 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\u2019s life, \u2018Dear Sofa, retreat\/and dog-house in living memory.\u2019 And \u2018Dear Sofa, when did you stop being a settee?\u2019 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 \u2018some I\u2019ve never opened and not one of them in years,\/ and I\u2019m not going to start again now. \u00a0Here, 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.<\/p>\n<p>A poem about a much-loved old \u2018A Straw Hat\u2019 could fall into the man-traps of the saccharine which Sansom sets himself in \u2018Sofa\u2019, but he redeems it with the exactitude of his description, the apparent simplicity of his images (\u2018It bobs like a cork in the past\/and present world,\u2019) and the self-deprecatory wryness and heartfelt emotion of the final lines, \u2018love of my life, light of my life willing\/to walk me even in a hat like this.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>\u2018Autumn Term\u2019 recalls a visit to an old primary school with an equally droll eye for the slightly absurd. \u2018Instead of Going to Work\u2019 reminded me of Simon Armitage\u2019s \u2018Hercules\u2019, 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 \u2018high culture\u2019 \u2013 he\u2019s trying to read <em>Finnegans Wake<\/em> (slowly) &#8211; and the ordinary, as the kids are \u2018perfecting the Ben &amp; Jerry\u2019s\/Diet Coke Facebook diet.\u2019 Yet he manages to genuinely move us when he steps out from his wryness to deliver the final lines of: \u2018Wherever you are, wherever you have to go,\/with your losses, I am lost too\/and the world is an endless book.\/Please come home.\u2019<\/p>\n<h5><em>Careful What You Wish For<\/em> is available to buy from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.carcanet.co.uk\/cgi-bin\/indexer?product=9781847772039\">Carcanet Press<\/a>.<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At first sight, the cover of Peter Sansom\u2019s sixth collection, Be Careful What You Wish For, and the poem to which it refers, \u2018Lava Lamp\u2019 \u2013 a concrete poem simulating, as the poet puts it, the \u2018soun dl ess gloo b le\/ and gl oop\u2019 of the lamps\u2019 shape-shifting contents \u2013\u00a0 are experimentally atypical of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.2.1 - 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