Last Place on Earth

Sansom Peter

"The Last Place on Earth" is a warm, witty celebration of the textures of a life. The vanishing world of a working-class childhood is evoked alongside football in the park and the purposeful calm of ironing; family parties and born-again bikers, jokes about fruit and the silent beauty of Sheffield on a summer night, its shops lit up like deserted cruise ships. Peter Sansom has an eye for what is distinctive in the mundane, an understanding of the power of half-submerged memories to bind us to people and places. Above all, his poems honour the quiet pleasures that give meaning to life, affirming the depths of ordinary happiness.

About the Author

Peter Sansom was born in 1958 in Nottinghamshire. For ten years Peter taught the MA Poetry at Huddersfield University, and more recently he was Fellow in Creative Writing at Leeds University. He is currently Company Poet with Prudential. He is also a director with Ann Sansom of the Poetry Business in Sheffield, where they edit "The North magazine" and Smith/Doorstop Books.

His influential book, "Writing Poems", is published by Bloodaxe (1994). Carcanet publish his four previous collections: "Everything You've Heard is True", "a Poetry Book Society Recommendation" (1990), "January" (1994), for which he received an Arts Council Writer's Bursary and an award from the Society of Authors, "Point of Sale" (2000) and "The Last Place on Earth" (2006). His books have earned admiring reviews and a loyal following. He is married to the poet, Ann Sansom and has four children. He has had a number of jobs: as writer-in-residence with Marks and Spencer, for instance, and as Guest Poet at "The Times Educational Supplement", in addition to writing radio plays.

His poem commissions include for "The Guardian", "The Observer", "Radio Three", "The Big Breakfast", a billboard in the centre of Lancaster and The Swedish Club which is a Marine Insurers in Gothenburg.

Reviews

"A congenial writer, whose usually informal metrical sense is, nevertheless, decisive and intuitively informed" – Times Literary Supplement

"His writing gains its vitality from the tension between the desire to remember and the necessity of moving on" – Poetry Review

"A serious intelligence only lightly disguised as self-mockery and expressed via devastatingly clear-sighted observation" – Yorkshire Post

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