Lanyard

Review\n'A serious intelligence only lightly disguised as self-mockery and expressed via devastatingly clear-sighted observation.' —Mary Sara, The Yorkshire Post\n'Peter Sansom's poems are eerie, and funny, and nostalgic and sad. They are full of loss, and yet offer such richness.' —Helena Nelson, Happenstance\n'On First Hearing Careless Whisper' is one of several poems in this compelling new collection that put time on pause to look at life through art, whether 1980s pop, or painting, or a congeries of writers including Emily Brontë, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, D.H. Lawrence, Alice Munro, Fernando Pessoa, and the New York Poets...and several of Sansom's beloved contemporaries. But keenly-observed family life is at the centre of this warm, witty, and moving book by one of our best-loved poets and teachers. Sansom evokes working-class life in the early and mid-twentieth century, through the 1970s of vinyl and tie-dye, and into the uncertain present day. We travel in his first car, and meet roofers, walkers, darts players, and a pigeon fancier. We see Sheffield as it is seldom portrayed. His elegies celebrate Gerard Benson, children's poet and founder of Poems on the Underground; and Sarah Maguire, poet, translator, and anthologist. All human life, and death, are to be found here. There is laughter and tears and a vivid evocation of a world that survives thanks to poems like these.