A night in Matlock Bath, an Ode to Indolence, a boy running the ploughed fields of cross-country, and the 1975 Reading Festival... Careful What You Wish For is winter mornings lit by the tame volcano of a lava lamp, and it is Camus, St-Exupery and Ke...

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 o...

"The Last Place on Earth" is a warm, witty celebration of the textures of a life. The vanishing world of a working-class childhood is evoked alongside football in the park and the purposeful calm of ironing; family parties and born-again bikers, joke...

Peter Sansom's "Everything You've Heard is True" (Poetry Book Society Recommendation, 1990) was a notable debut. "The Times" declared the poems on his Nottinghamshire childhood "as good as Tony Harrison's adventures in a similar vein", celebrating "a...