Description
The Night is Young – Peter Sansom
The Night is Young
I have drunk
a highland malt that took my head off
to show willing at two in the morning,
the odd glass of red with a meal for my heart
and a pint of shandy at the quiz,
but not
let my hair down sick as a dog
hair of the dog, not drunk drunk,
not for years, and even then, hormones
everywhere, never lost it completely
brought back a curry in a taxi
on a girlfriend, not said
what I didn’t know I meant it was
the drink talking
not Friday night drunk or office party
drunk in charge of a photocopier
let’s have some fun
as Jane Austen said
on this reckless planet.
God help me to get to this age
and never what a great night that was
if only I could remember it
completely and utterly
drunk? Me? Not ever,
not yet.
Author Biog
Peter Sansom has made ‘a sort of living’ from poetry for over twenty years. His Carcanet books are ‘witty, realistic and imaginative’ – Observer, winning awards and a loyal readership, while his Writing Poems, Bloodaxe 1994, is still said to change writing lives.
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 magazine and Smith/Doorstop Books.
Review
“Peter Sansom’s 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 “Pop Bottle” does, sitting on the opposite page to “River”: “I love to paddle back / forty years, more, in the hurry-shallows / among the pebbles . . .”. 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: “It’s 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”. Times Literary Supplement
(The Rialto Bridge Pamphlet 2009)
ISBN 0-95551273-4-2 Price £5.50
