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 betw...