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. Many of Kevin Crossley-Holland's beautifully wrought, often moving poems inhabit the crossing-places between actuality, memory and imagination; and invoking Orpheus and Atargatis, Pierre de Ronsard and Beethoven, they journey from Hades to a hellish warzone, and from the high Alps and to the creeks and saltmarshes of north Norfolk.