Carcanet online book launch: Lanyard by Peter Sansom

Join Peter Sansom as he launches his new poetry collection Lanyard, and talks about it with fellow Carcanet poet Ian Pople, himself launching a book with the press on 29 June.

Described as “warm, witty and moving”, this new collection brings together some of Peter Sansom’s lifelong concerns: family, for example, working-class life, art and books.

Manchester-based Carcanet Press published Peter Sansom’s first book in 1990, and Lanyard is his twelfth Carcanet collection; Careful What you Wish For won him a Cholmondeley Award in 2016. He has also published the handbook Writing Poems (Bloodaxe, 1994; new edition due 2024). The current Poet Laureate Simon Armitage has said of Sansom: ‘…in my view the UK’s most astute and effective tutor, a guiding light through his deft criticism and the example of his own work.’

Born in 1958 in Nottinghamshire, for ten years Peter taught Huddersfield University’s poetry masters course, and he has been Fellow in Poetry at Leeds and Manchester Universities as well as Company Poet with M&S and The Prudential. With his wife, fellow poet Ann Sansom, he has run courses for The Poetry Society and every year for the Arvon Foundation for over thirty years, and he is one of the directors of The Poetry Business in Sheffield and co-editor of The North journal and SmithDoorstop Books, which published the Laureate Choice series selected by Manchester Writing School’s Carol Ann Duffy.

Lanyard takes in life and death, laughter and tears, and journeys through a number of places including Whitby, Ullswater and the Lake District, Harlech, Halifax, Cleethorpes and that top tourist destination, Mansfield. We see Sheffield as it is seldom portrayed. Lanyard takes in school and college, a first car, gatefold record sleeves, darts, teaching, a leaky roof, a leaky heart, pigeon-fancying and the business of poetry.

Described as “warm, witty and moving”, this new collection brings together some of Peter Sansom’s lifelong concerns: family, for example, working-class life, art and books. Poems include figures such as Barbara Hepworth, Emily Brontë, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Frederick Forsyth, Alice Munro, DH Lawrence, Fernando Pessoa and the New York Poets, several of Sansom’s beloved contemporaries and even George Michael.

As always with Carcanet Press events, extracts of the text will be shown during the reading so that you can read along, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. Registration for this online event is £2, redeemable against the cost of the book – attendees will receive a discount code and details of how to get hold of the new book during and after the event.

For more readings by Carcanet poets, see here and here.