Kevin Crossley-Holland (b. 1941), who was the Guest of Leicester Poetry Society on April 13 2007, grew up with a passion for history, encouraged by a father who recited folk tales to his son, accompanying himself on a Welsh harp. The young Kevin was so entranced by the medieval and ancient past that he even set up a museum in the garden shed. At Oxford University he developed an abiding love of Anglo-Saxon, something that has re-surfaced time and again in his writing career, in his translations, his re-telling of myths and the "singan ond secgan" (the "sing and say") of his poetry.  With the encouragement of J R R Tolkien, he translated Beowulf. His re-imagining of the Arthurian legends in his trilogy for children are hugely popular and critically acclaimed, receiving the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize amongst others. He is the author of seven volumes of poetry, and his Selected Poems was published in 2001. Recent books include Moored Man (a cycle of North Norfolk poems with watercolours and sketches by Norman Ackroyd). Kevin Crossley-Holland now lives on the north Norfolk coast in East Anglia. He has a Minnesotan wife, Linda, two sons (Kieran and Dominic) and two daughters (Oenone and Eleanor). He is an Honorary Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford, a patron of the Society of Storytelling, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Website: http://www.kevincrossley-holland.com/ 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) His language has been honed by the Norfolk and Suffolk climate itself, and has the polish of split flint. Ronald Blythe From 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