Peter Sansom was the Marks and Spencer Poet in Residence during 1999. This collection includes his poetic "diary" of that year, alongside a range of poems which cover the spectrum of family experience from young babies learning to speak to the death of a parent. The personal and the public, his family and the demands made on him by the literature industry, blend together in poems of wit, sensitivity and great subtlety. He moves from free verse into rhyme and out again with ease, his vision of the world, its absurdity and evanescent tragedy, never dimming.