The Night is Young<\/strong><\/p>\n I have drunk God help me to get to this age Peter Sansom has made ‘a sort of living’ from poetry for over twenty years. His Carcanet books are ‘witty, realistic and imaginative’ – Observer<\/em>, winning awards and a loyal readership, while his Writing Poems<\/em>, Bloodaxe 1994, is still said to change writing lives.<\/p>\n He has been Fellow in Poetry at both Leeds and Manchester Universities, and company poet for M&S and the Prudential. He is a director with Ann Sansom of The Poetry Business in Sheffield, where they edit The North<\/em> magazine and Smith\/Doorstop Books.<\/p>\n “Peter Sansom\u2019s The Night is Young is lovely to look at and to handle, larger in format, allowing plenty of open space. Sansom has perfected the conversational (rather than the conversation) poem, a rueful wit carbonating the lyrical flow, just as his \u201cPop Bottle\u201d does, sitting on the opposite page to \u201cRiver\u201d: \u201cI love to paddle back \/ forty years, more, in the hurry-shallows \/ among the pebbles . . .\u201d. Youth is, in all senses, his capital: school, warehouse work, best friends, the moon landing. Desolate landscapes appeal to him (Antarctica, the Cairngorms, a station buffet, an abandoned corner of Sheffield), and the favoured mode is a troubled pastoral: \u201cIt\u2019s a kind of trespass, I know, thinking this, \/ because I can walk on and unthink it, which I do, \/ among the identical miles of trees, the mountains seen now \/ from a bend in the road, their lunar tracks and tarns, \/ the bivouacs of bright surviving snow\u201d. Times Literary Supplement<\/em><\/p>\n (The Rialto Bridge Pamphlet 2009) “Peter Sansom\u2019s The Night is Young is lovely to look at and to handle, larger in format, allowing plenty of open space. Sansom has perfected the conversational (rather than the conversation) poem, a rueful wit carbonating the lyrical flow, just as his \u201cPop Bottle\u201d does, sitting on the opposite page to \u201cRiver\u201d: \u201cI love to paddle back \/ forty years, more, in the hurry-shallows \/ among the pebbles . . .\u201d. Youth is, in all senses, his capital: school, warehouse work, best friends, the moon landing. Desolate landscapes appeal to him (Antarctica, the Cairngorms, a station buffet, an abandoned corner of Sheffield), and the favoured mode is a troubled pastoral: \u201cIt\u2019s a kind of trespass, I know, thinking this, \/ because I can walk on and unthink it, which I do, \/ among the identical miles of trees, the mountains seen now \/ from a bend in the road, their lunar tracks and tarns, \/ the bivouacs of bright surviving snow\u201d. Times Literary Supplement<\/em>
\na highland malt that took my head off
\nto show willing at two in the morning,
\nthe odd glass of red with a meal for my heart
\nand a pint of shandy at the quiz,
\nbut not
\nlet my hair down sick as a dog
\nhair of the dog, not drunk<\/em> drunk,
\nnot for years, and even then, hormones
\neverywhere, never lost it completely
\nbrought back a curry in a taxi
\non a girlfriend, not said
\nwhat I didn\u2019t know I meant it was
\nthe drink talking<\/em>
\nnot Friday night drunk or office party
\ndrunk in charge of a photocopier
\nlet\u2019s have some fun
\nas Jane Austen said
\non this reckless planet.<\/p>\n
\nand never what a great night that was
\nif only I could remember it<\/em>
\ncompletely and utterly
\ndrunk? Me?<\/em> Not ever,
\nnot yet.<\/p>\nAuthor Biog<\/h3>\n
Review<\/h3>\n
\nISBN 0-95551273-4-2 Price \u00a35.50<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\n <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":241,"template":"","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":""},"product_brand":[],"product_cat":[171],"product_tag":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1941","1":"product","2":"type-product","3":"status-publish","4":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"product_cat-bridge_pamphlets","7":"product_shipping_class-pamphlets","9":"first","10":"instock","11":"shipping-taxable","12":"purchasable","13":"product-type-simple"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product\/1941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/product"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"product_brand","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_brand?post=1941"},{"taxonomy":"product_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_cat?post=1941"},{"taxonomy":"product_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_tag?post=1941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}