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.