During the Late and Long Continuing Cold - Sean O'Brien;David Wheatley

During the Late and Long Continuing Cold is a fittingly rich and various tribute to Peter Didsbury, bringing together an exceptional gathering of poets whose work bears the marks of his singular influence. Across elegy, homage, comic riff, lyric meditation and formal invention, the anthology returns again and again to the qualities that make Didsbury indispensable: his visionary exactness, his feel for the uncanny lodged inside the ordinary, his spiritual and historical reach, and his gift for making language itself seem charged with revelation. Hull, estuary, drainage, weather, birds, ruins, gods, saints, machines and pubs all pass through these pages, not as mere tribute tokens but as living elements in a shared imaginative weather. The result is both celebration and continuation, an anthology that honours Didsbury not through piety but through alertness, wit, and the restless vitality of poems written in conversation with his work.

ABOUT Peter Didsbury:

Peter Didsbury was born in 1946 in Fleetwood, Lancashire, and moved to Hull at the age of six. He read English and Hebrew at Oxford. Bloodaxe launched his first collection, The Butchers of Hull, alongside Douglas Dunn's Hull anthology, A Rumoured City in 1982. An expanded edition of his Scenes from a Long Sleep: New & Collected Poems, also from Bloodaxe, has just been published.