Scenes from a Long Sleep: New & Collected Poems

All Peter Didsbury’s books have had wildly enthusiastic reviews. The Classical Farm won him a Cholmondeley Award, and his last two collections were Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Despite working away from the literary limelight as an archaeologist, this ‘secular mystic with the lugubrious tongue’ (Independent on Sunday) has attracted a dedicated readership: the TLS called him the best new poet published by Bloodaxe. Didsbury’s staggering powers of invention, outrageous ?outing of convention and subversive humour are now fully and flagrantly displayed in Scenes from a Long Sleep. This startling volume is a feast of imaginative wonders which will win him even more new readers.

Peter Didsbury was born in 1946 in Fleetwood, Lancashire. He moved to Hull at the age of six, and read English and Hebrew at Oxford. After teaching English in Hull for eight years, he turned to the past for employment as well as for inspiration, becoming an archaeologist. His retrospective Scenes from a Long Sleep: New & Collected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2003) drew on three previous Bloodaxe collections, The Butchers of Hull (1982), The Classical Farm (1987) and That Old-Time Religion (1994), plus a new collection, A Natural History. He won a Cholmondeley Award for The Classical Farm, which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, as was That Old-Time Religion.