Peter Sansom
may be handsome
but his syntax is what
makes him hot.
Here is a handful of sentences, stripped of the line-breaks, from poems in ‘Lanyard’ (Carcanet, 2022), which book we considered in the Finding Poetry book club. I’ll say a few words about each sentence, but it’s what they have in common that I’m keenest to display. Each is rather long, and somewhat grammatically complex, with embedded clauses and asides. Yet each is extremely efficient, conveying more, it seems to me, than is typical for the word- or phrase-count. By modelling speech and inner speech, with their momentary digressions, the sentences give us, at the same time, a lot of interesting information and Sansom’s mood, his own response or attitude to the information. It’s one of the tricks that makes the poems so touching. You could say that the writing tells as well as shows, but it does so, in my book, subtly and attractively.
“I drove thirty virtuous miles with the dozen years of our growing up, to say I’m here and sit with him in the dayroom once a week for a month, though he was there longer.”
(from ‘Brian’)
I’m moved by the shame implicit in “virtuous”, and the compression of the remembered years as a travelling companion.
“We said our paths must cross in this small world, but I met you again only in poems, your own, unmistakable, and those Latin names gathered in Flora Poetica, the real meaning of anthology.”
(‘Poetry Society i.m. Sarah Maguire’)
Who knew, apart from Sansom and the OED, that the original meaning of “Anthology” was a treatise on flowers?
“I pull into a nook not a passing place of a sudden to walk on the moon off-message for a while, the good news still in my still-hippy head.”
(‘The Struggle’)
“Not a passing place” tracks the driver’s thought-process.
“Who’d have thought that suddenly it’s this year and here we are with the youngest, the teacher, by the pigeon cotes at Sky Edge.”
(‘Pigeons’)
Every part of the sentence works together to emphasise the mystery of time’s quick passing.
“Footpaths go off in all directions, up through history and geology, keeping fit, walking from friendship or grief, or just instead.”
(‘Kiosk at Ladybower’)
As it happens, the footpaths and walks work as a metaphor for Sansom’s poetry, its movements through places and times and emotions.
Stephen Payne 