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The Last Place on Earth
"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, jokes about fruit and the silent beauty of Sheffield on a summer night, its shops lit up like deserted cruise ships. Peter Sansom has an eye for what is distinctive in the mundane, an understanding of the power of half-submerged memories to bind us to people and places. Above all, his poems honour the quiet pleasures that give meaning to life, affirming the depths of ordinary happiness.
64 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
April 14, 2016
Poems from PN Review, Poetry Review, The Rialto, The SHOp, Stand, etc. 44 pages of poetry which includes 6.5 pages of prose (a retelling of the Wife of Bath's Tale). It's rather chatty. "Ted Savoury" is getting on for vignette. When the text waxes poetic, it doesn't always work -
Dusk. The moon is a sickle stuck there
...
I could reach out to try the edge, but flinch
from what I know about the moon (p.16)
Some passages read as if they're lists of phrases brain-stormed from the title - "Banana" for example or less blatantly, this, which ends "L.O.V.E."
I am blind, which may be why
I walk you into doors,
metaphorically, literally,
always the last to know
or "Living Room" where the listed description ends with "one cupboard a dispensary,/ the other a distillery", or "I", where the associations begin visually with "that door seen from the side,/ the rope into an imagined well" then become more phonic seque-ing into "eye" and "high". Then the tone changes, becomes analytical - "But what I// really am these days,/ the mirror of my punning says,/ is my dad, except/ he was more flat cap than smart alec,/ and I'd be Clear As Mud". Finally the "I" is rotated 90 degrees to be a hyphen between dates. Some people might think it gimmicky but I like it.
Spoiler alert: "An Easy Riddle" (which I like) is about a shower.
"July Football at Abbeyfield Park" has lots of evocative detail that takes me back to childhood. Perhaps that's all a text needs to do to be a poem. I think the book depends on that hope rather too heavily though. And the "poetic" endings that are tagged on can appear awkwardly sub-Larkinesque.
Dusk. The moon is a sickle stuck there
...
I could reach out to try the edge, but flinch
from what I know about the moon (p.16)
Some passages read as if they're lists of phrases brain-stormed from the title - "Banana" for example or less blatantly, this, which ends "L.O.V.E."
I am blind, which may be why
I walk you into doors,
metaphorically, literally,
always the last to know
or "Living Room" where the listed description ends with "one cupboard a dispensary,/ the other a distillery", or "I", where the associations begin visually with "that door seen from the side,/ the rope into an imagined well" then become more phonic seque-ing into "eye" and "high". Then the tone changes, becomes analytical - "But what I// really am these days,/ the mirror of my punning says,/ is my dad, except/ he was more flat cap than smart alec,/ and I'd be Clear As Mud". Finally the "I" is rotated 90 degrees to be a hyphen between dates. Some people might think it gimmicky but I like it.
Spoiler alert: "An Easy Riddle" (which I like) is about a shower.
"July Football at Abbeyfield Park" has lots of evocative detail that takes me back to childhood. Perhaps that's all a text needs to do to be a poem. I think the book depends on that hope rather too heavily though. And the "poetic" endings that are tagged on can appear awkwardly sub-Larkinesque.
Displaying 1 of 1 review