The Breaking Hour

This is a book of meetings: a mother meets her baby; a man steps into his childhood; an old man encounters Godfather Death; and in the persona of Harald Hardrada, a passionate man wrestles with his fantasies, and north meets south. Invoking Orpheus and Atargatis, Pierre de Ronsard and Beethoven, and moving from Hades to a hellish warzone, the high Alps and his own beloved north Norfolk, many of Kevin Crossley-Holland’s beautifully wrought, often moving poems inhabit the crossing places between actuality, memory, and imagination. They engage with the beauty of language and its limitations, and with grievous loss propitiated by affirmation and love.

Kevin Crossley-Holland is a writer, a poet, a translator, and the author of The Anglo-Saxon World, The Exeter Book of Riddles, The Mountains of Norfolk, The Seeing Stone, and Short!: A Book of Very Short Stories. He is an honorary fellow of St. Edmund Hall, Oxford; fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; and president of the School Library Association.