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Published to celebrate his 80th birthday, this expanded edition of Peter Didsbury’s Scenes from a Long Sleep (2003) includes a later collection, A Fire Shared (2020), as well as new, previously uncollected poems.
Didsbury’s staggering powers of invention, outrageous flouting of convention and subversive humour are fully and flagrantly displayed in this new collected edition of the poetry of this ‘secular mystic with the lugubrious tongue’ (Independent on Sunday). All the poems from The Butchers of Hull (1982), The Classical Farm (1987), That Old-Time Religion (1997) and A Natural History (2003) are included.
‘Didsbury’s is the kind of work which makes you realise what you’ve been putting up with in the meantime. The product of a large and peculiar imagination, it shows a sense of adventure hardly to be paralleled in contemporary poetry…In Didsbury’s work there is glimpsed an alternative history where Catholic Europe and the East are strangely mixed, where matters of faith and damnation are still alive…its power to delight, terrify and enlighten comes from a way of seeing for which most contemporary categories are meaningless’ – Sean O’Brien, London Magazine
‘Some of his invention is pure play, some hints at a rich, humane vision of England which yields a kind of surrealism all of its own: estuaries, farms, country estates, city streets and bedsits, a kind of tatty or compromised pastoral are detectable in Didsbury’s oblique, desperate celebrations.’ – Alan Jenkins, Observer
‘With his unique way of seeing, Peter Didsbury is still one of the wisest, if also one of the most eccentric and unpredictable, of English poetic holymen’ – Ian Sansom, Times Literary Supplement
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. An expanded edition – also drawing upon a later collection, A Fire Shared (2020), along with new and previously uncollected poems – is published by Bloodaxe Books in 2026 to mark his 80th birthday. He won a Cholmondeley Award for The Classical Farm, which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, as was That Old-Time Religion.