Scenes from a Long Sleep: New & Collected Poems: expanded edition - Softcover

Didsbury, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 178037822X ISBN 13: 9781780378220

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 2026

Synopsis

‘A sense of adventure hardly to be paralleled in contemporary poetry’ – London Magazine

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 has cultivated his own eccentricities in order to produce work that risks the ridiculous in order to gain glimpses of the wonderful. Scenes from a Long Sleep gives us a host of reasons to be glad he has done so.' – William Wootten, The Guardian

About this title

About the Author

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 178037822X
• ISBN 13: 9781780378220
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288