Review – Peter Sansom’s Lanyard

Here’s my review of Peter Sansom‘s Lanyard on the Mechanics’ Institute Review:

Lanyard is Sansom’s most recent collection of poems. It is published by Carcanet, as were his previous collections, including 2020’s Selected Poems. Lanyard is a beautiful, sad, lonely gathering of elegies for lost friends, lost landscapes, lost industries, lost communities, and lost possibilities. As the world Sansom grew up in has been dismantled by various species of government, as his family and friends have gone their separate ways – many to the grave (I wake and you’re ten years dead. ‘To the Waterfall’) – there’s a sense in Lanyard of Sansom working out who has gone and who remains, using his poetry as an inventory of the ones who meant the most to him, and as a rallying call to raise himself up to carry on without them:

      I never thanked you, but I thank you now,
      A decade too late …
      (‘Barbara and Derek, Derek and Barbara’)