Collected Poems 1972 - 2024

Kevin Crossley-Holland is a master, a magician and commander of the language, the roots of whose work are deeply entwined with ancient patt erns of truth and knowledge. I salute and venerate him.

Kevin Crossley-Holland’s Collected Poems is a serious achievement. Underpinning its variety of voices and perspectives is a consistent vision that finds expression in poems at once temporally palimpsestic and geographically grounded, crossing and re-crossing the fine line between the every day and myth. Like the ‘blue hour’ by which they are haunted, they are often elegiac, but always intensely present.

He is a poet listening to his own history through the clamour of seabirds and gales and well-caught scraps of this and that which blow across the land. His language has been honed by the Norfolk and Suffolk climate itself and has the polish of split flint.

With a deep understanding of archaeology, a painterly eye for beauty, and a naturalist’s commitment to sharp observation, Kevin Crossley-Holland has spent a lifetime mining the resources of elegy, myth, lyric, prayer, and dramatic monologue to form delicately crafted meditations on love and loss, time and memory, spiritual longing and emotional growth.

This is a fantastic collection, and I love it. His poetry is so very rich and so varied, and covers such an impressive amount of ground. There are anthems, war cries, memories, love songs and hymns to the glory of nature, all writt en in language that is clear, robust, and sometimes luminously, breathtakingly beautiful.