This autumn, ARC Publications will release a landmark volume: Collected Poems by Kevin Crossley-Holland. Spanning more than fifty years of work, the collection draws together the full sweep of Kevin’s poetic output – from early lyrical pieces to more recent, previously unpublished work – in a single, beautifully curated edition.
Readers have long known Kevin as a master of the mythic and the personal, a poet whose voice is grounded in the textures of place and time. His new Collected Poems is no exception – and the early praise is already full of excitement and admiration.
Poet and academic Lucy Newlyn calls it:
“a deeply distinguished collection… [that] spans the entirety of his career and includes a selection of hitherto unpublished poems, confirming that his stature as a writer is undiminished by the passage of time.”
She writes:
“Kevin Crossley-Holland has always been a consummate storyteller. His home in Norfolk is the hub, ‘always still, always turning’ from which he reaches out to his surroundings and readers. His poems are adventures in miniature… With a deep understanding of archaeology, a painterly eye for beauty, and a naturalist’s commitment to sharp observation, he has spent a lifetime mining the resources of elegy, myth, lyric, prayer, and dramatic monologue to form delicately crafted meditations on love and loss, time and memory, spiritual longing and emotional growth.”
The collection is varied in tone and form, ranging from elegy to anthem, from quiet reflection to the elemental energy of landscape and myth.
Bestselling author Joanne Harris has praised the collection’s scope and emotional depth, describing the poems as:
“rich and varied, covering an impressive amount of ground. There are anthems, war cries, memories, love songs and hymns to the glory of nature, all written in language that is clear, robust, and sometimes luminously, breathtakingly beautiful.”
She added that if this collection is indeed a “last hurrah,” then “it will surely be a spectacular accompaniment to [Kevin’s] amazing body of work.”
This is a book rooted in lived experience, but also in literary tradition. Kevin’s poetry carries the presence of myth, folklore, and the natural world into the now.
As Jane Griffiths, poet and literary historian, writes:
“Representing a lifetime’s work, Kevin Crossley-Holland’s Collected Poems is a serious achievement. Underpinning its variety of voices and perspectives is a consistent vision that finds expression in poems at once temporally palimpsestic and geographically grounded, crossing and re-crossing the fine line between the everyday and myth. Like the ‘blue hour’ by which they are haunted, they are often elegiac, but always intensely present.”
And as Philip Pullman, a long-time admirer, puts it:
“Kevin Crossley-Holland is a master, a magician and commander of the language, the roots of whose work are deeply entwined with ancient patterns of truth and knowledge. I salute and venerate him.”
Kevin Crossley-Holland’s Collected Poems will be published this autumn by ARC Publications.
🔗 Find out more and reserve your copy here