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.