As a poet…

‘Sansom is one of very few people who can manage to write poetry so artlessly suspended above the ground that it appears to have no visible means of support. Where are the tightly rhymed couplets? Where are the blocks of terse verse? Where are the sonnets and the vienettas (or whatever poetic confection is currently thrilling the architects of obscuration…)? What we have instead are poems that convey with extraordinary precision the imprecision of our lives.’ – Jonathan Davidson, Under the Radar

‘Witty, realistic and imaginative. Auden, Hayden and Uccello live in his pages as happily as snooker stars, Tesco and Extra Strong Mints” — The Observer

‘A mature assurance which results in poems that are always entertaining and frequently something more” — Carol Ann Duffy, The Guardian

‘Brilliant at evoking the tender details of a working-class childhood in the 1960s – ‘after the war and before give peace a chance” — Andy Croft, Morning Star

‘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

As an editor…

‘Peter Sansom is an island of enthusiasm in a sea of indifference; a cloud of delight in an unthinking sky, a seahorse of excitement in a lagoon that frequently says nothing exciting is happening in poetry today so I will go back to bed. The island, the cloud and the seahorse are all you need for poetry, as Pound said to Eliot.” — Ian McMillan

‘Peter has the uncanny ability to see the poem intended through the poem I have written and to urge me on, killing my darlings, drowning my kittens, until, lo, we have together arrived in fact where I thought I had arrived some drafts earlier. Peter is the soul of tact and also the soul of rigour. Working with him is an astringent delight, almost the best thing about writing a poem… Indispensible and irreplaceable.”  — Michael Schmidt

As a teacher…

‘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.  Peter Sansom is Mr Poetry.”  — Simon Armitage

‘The best writing tutor in the world” — The Guardian