Poetry
Kevin Crossley-Holland has written eight collections of poetry. He published his Selected Poems in 2001.
Written over almost forty years, his poems are notable for their perceptive and warm record of relationships, especially that of father and child; their powerful response to the landscape of Norfolk and Suffolk; and their awareness of historical and cultural continuities and dislocation. Sensuous, spare and forceful, many of his poems are also concerned with spiritual dimensions.
In 2006, Kevin published Moored Man:A Cycle of North Norfolk Poems with watercolours and etchings by the Royal Academician, Norman Ackroyd. These poems revolve around the mythical being who embodies the wilderness and warring elements of the north Norfolk saltmarshes. Ronald Blythe writes:
What enthralls us when we arrive at the coast is neither land nor sea but that narrow flux of both of them called the shore. It is the shore which does most of the talking, which utters, which we listen to. At first it seems to say the same things over and over again, and is mesmeric. Then it becomes both soothing and threatening, musical and dissonant, inspiring and wretched, easy to understand and complex as it articulates things which cannot be heard in any other place. Moored Man interprets this watery voice in a wonderful manner. In a sequence of wild, desperate, beautiful and original statements the seashore tells how it can never get away, how it has struggled in its liquid chains, and how it is both captive and yet free. Moored Man may be tied to the edge but he is never stationary. He is all movement. He may be mud-dull but yet he is a marvelous orator. Although below the rocks, he is a visionary. This is a fine poem. There is a tragic loneliness in it reminiscent of that in Ted Hughes’s Crow. Kevin Crossley-Holland’s Moored Man is the voice of that ultimate geography which separates land from water. He has listened to what it says for the best part of his life and is able to give us this exciting translation.
His poems give off as authentic a smell of East Anglia as do Crabbe’s, and, as with Crabbe’s, the beauty of language is hard-won.
Peter Porter (Observer)
Crossley-Holland uncovers not only words but an entire landscape which haunts and is rich in echoes’
Helen Dunmore (Observer)
These are poems to taste with the tongue and eye of the mind.
Herbert Lomas (Ambit)
Kevin is the editor of The Oxford Book of Travel Verse. With Lawrence Sail, he edited The New Exeter Book of Riddles and the anthology of Christmas card poems, Light Unlocked.
He is the co-founder and sometime chairman of the annual festival of Poetry-next-the-Sea, now in its tenth year.
Leaf-Girl
Round and round the trampled ground between the flaming maple and the black walnut, and out across the nickel rink to the winter warming-hut, round, round with bounds and yells, skips and little rushes you chased October leaves.
Curtsy, shout, leap and spin, your pale face thin and hair haywire, the best red-gold: so you became the leaves you caught. And watching you I think I thought there's some movement, some pursuit best expressing each of us.
Selected Poems, Enitharmon Press, London 2001
Here, at the Tide's Turning
You close your eyes and see
the stillness of the mullet-nibbled arteries, samphire on the mudflats almost underwater, and on the saltmarsh whiskers of couch-grass twitching, waders roosting, sea-lavender faded to ashes.
In the dark, or almost dark shapes sit on the staithe muttering of plickplack, and greenshanks, and zos beds;
a duck arrives in a flap, late for a small pond party.
The small yard's creak and groan and lazy rap, muffled water music.
One sky-streamer, pale and half-frayed, still dreaming of colour.
Water and earth and air quite integral: all Waterslain one sombre aquarelle.
From the beginning, and last year, this year, you can think of no year when you have not sat on this stub of salt-eaten stanchion.
Dumbfounded by such tracts of marsh and sky - the void swirled round you and pressed against you - you've found a mercy in small stones.
This year, next year, you cannot think of not returning: not to perch in the blue hour on this blunt jetty, not to wait, as of right, for the iron hour and the turning of the tide.
You cross the shillying and the shadows and, stepping on to the marsh, enter a wilderness.
Quick wind works around you.
You are engulfed in a wave of blue flames.
No line that is not clear cut and severe, nothing baroque or bogus. The voices of young children rehearsing on the staithe are lifted from another time.
This is battleground. Dark tide fills the winking pulks, floods the mud-canyons.
This flux, this anchorage.
Here you watch, you write, you tell the tides. You walk clean into the possible.
Selected Poems, Enitharmon Press, London 2001