Peter Sansom's Selected Poems brings together twenty years of quintessential Sansom, a poet who has made the local and familiar his own resonant territory. Supermarkets and darts matches, life with teenagers and family funerals, the common ground of modern life, make up the fabric of poems that capture the distinctiveness of the ordinary with a robust and sharp-eyed tenderness. Selected Poems includes revised versions of poems from Peter Sansom's four Carcanet collections, with poems from his 2009 pamphlet The Night is Young.

Peter Sansom was born in 1958 in Nottinghamshire. For ten years Peter taught the MA Poetry at Huddersfield University, and more recently he was Fellow in Creative Writing at Leeds University. He is currently Company Poet with Prudential. He is also a director with Ann Sansom of the Poetry Business in Sheffield, where they edit The North magazine and Smith/Doorstop Books. His influential book, Writing Poems, is published by Bloodaxe (1994). Carcanet publish his four previous collections: Everything You've Heard is True, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation (1990), January (1994), for which he received an Arts Council Writer's Bursary and an award from the Society of Authors, Point of Sale (2000) and The Last Place on Earth (2006). His books have earned admiring reviews and a loyal following. He is married to the poet, Ann Sansom and has four children. He has had a number of jobs: as writer-in-residence with Marks and Spencer, for instance, and as Guest Poet at The Times Educational Supplement, in addition to writing radio plays.