Careful What You Wish For

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-Exupéry, and Ken Dodd. Also it is Robert Lowell in a canal boat just outside Mirfield, not to mention family poems and love and tennis poems, and the biggest comeback in golf history—as told by the caddy. Peter Sansom’s latest collection is clear-eyed, tender, and full of bewilderment by what life is and does.