Please join us to celebrate the launch of Lanyard by Peter Sansom. Hosting the reading will be fellow Carcanet poet Ian Pople, joining Peter to discuss the new book. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along.

‘On First Hearing Careless Whisper’ is one of several poems in this brilliant new collection that put time on pause in order to look at life through art: 1980s pop, painting, or a congeries of writers including Emily Bronte, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, D. H. Lawrence, Alice Munro, Fernando Pessoa and the New York Poets… and several of Sansom’s beloved contemporaries. But the richness of family life is at the centre of this assured and utterly open book by one of our best-loved poets and teachers.

Carcanet published Sansom’s first book in 1990. Lanyard is his twelfth Carcanet collection. There is a compelling development that makes it possible, in Lanyard, to come close in on the truths that excite him: how people lived, how they live, how he lives. Family is at the heart of this warm, witty and moving book in which he evokes working-class life in the early and mid-twentieth century, and from the 1970s, vinyl, tie-dye, crushed velvet, gatefold sleeves. We travel in his first car, meet him as teacher, roofer, pigeon fancier. We see Sheffield as it is seldom portrayed. And Sansom is an unparalleled expert in the poetry business, as editor, publisher—and teacher. All human life, and death, is to be found here. There is laughter and tears and a vivid evocation of a world that survives thanks to poems like these.

Registration for this online event will cost £2, later redeemable against the cost of the book. All attendees will receive the discount code and how to purchase the book during and after event.