Poetry

Sheffield By Night

After the nightclubs have turned out and before

the cleaners have plugged in, the city is as still

as a snowglobe this last day of summer. 

I sweat up Paradise St that was Workhouse Rd

and out under green-lit trees of the cathedral

like strolling through an artist’s impression;

then over new tramtracks that dad would know

as far as the Cutler’s Hall and HSBC.  

A dog walking itself in the corner of my eye

past Pollards is gone before I see it’s a fox. 

Next, Boots the Chemists bright as a cruise ship

but the Marie Celeste; then over Fargate

and down Chapel Walk, the Link, the Samaritans,

and double-take at shoes a month’s wages;

past the delivery-end of M&S now turn left

by the Crucible.  I’m not mugged

in the subway or offered sex to feed a habit. 

Ghost roadworks on the steep bit of Flat Street

and in the waking Interchange Paul Simon’s

got that ticket still for his destination.

The Grade II listed eyesore on the skyline

is a memory of the Socialist Republic

and in its people-centred daring typical

of Sheaf Field, home of the cyclepath and bendi

-bus, the most wooded city in Europe if you

don’t listen to Brum, and the most parks too,

that turned the steelworks into a shopping centre,

and the shopping centre into another world –

then suddenly here, at what I think of as Midland Station,

to carry this lightheaded flu to Reading.

July Football at Abbeyfield Park

What was me and Tom playing three-and-in’s

twenty-odd of us now, toddlers to grown men

up and down the twilight in slip-on (off) shoes,

or Beckham 7 shirts and Nike boots, oblivious

to the swifts and/or bats and the brilliant armada

of hot air balloons over Attercliffe.

The swings at the far end are deserted now

of teenagers with their cans; a dog-walker

shouts to a bush; and at once the crown green’s

empty, most of them in the Tollgate

where Roy will be thinking of calling time. 

At the offy too Shaheena’s slotting the grilles

onto the windows, though she’ll stay open

till they turn out, which means we can stop

on our way back, clarted up and dripping with sweat,

for milk and bread and nearly yesterday’s paper.

Peter Sansom, Alumni Poet

Peter Sansom's books of poems are published by Carcanet, and his handbook, Writing Poems, is from Bloodaxe.  He is a director of the Poetry Business and editor of Smith/Doorstop Books and the North magazine.  Formerly writer-in-residence with M&S, he is currently Company Poet at Prudential.  (No, really.) He writes:

Thanks very much for taking these poems – it’s an honour to be on-line with you. They’re from a collection published in October called Last Place on Earth – which is an unfortunate title in this context.  But it doesn't refer to Sheffield or even the more likely Sutton-in-Ashfield (where I grew up).  It’s a line from a poem thinking back to coming out of a pub at closing time, me and some sixth-form pals, and just setting off, walking all night across into Matlock.  And in my mind somehow from there it’s about that see-saw time of life when parents (and in my case older brothers and sisters) are dying and your own kids are growing up and away.  Michael Schmidt pleased me by saying the book is 'Wordsworth's Prelude meets D H Lawrence in Tescos'.  The woman writing the blurb, who is a smart person and terrifying anyway so who would argue, says the book is about happiness.  Which sits oddly with all the death, but I think she's right.  I did one reading last year – I mean one in total, I don't know how Sophie Hannah makes half a million or whatever it is a year from readings – and was accused of being too happy to be a poet.  I am a poet though, for the reason that all poets are, that I can't not be.  Which I think is what my mum meant when she said 'You'll never have no money Peter as long as you've a hole in your arse'.  Admittedly, in my case I compounded matters by marrying a poet, though happily an alumnus of the Sheffield English Dept.  In fact, Ann wrote some of her best early poems at Sheffield, which was one of the reasons we moved here, ten years ago now, among the dreaming spires of Pitsmoor.

Good luck to Route 57 and all who sail on-line on her!