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-Exupery 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 come-back in golf history, as told by the caddy. 'Entertaining and frequently something more', Carol Ann Duffy said of Sansom's first book. This sixth Carcanet collection is clear-eyed, tender, and just as bewildered by what life is and does.