Peter Didsbury was born in 1946 in Fleetwood, Lancashire, and moved to Hull at the age of six, where he has spent most of his life since reading English and Hebrew at Oxford. Scenes from a Long Sleep includes all the poems from his collections The Butchers of Hull (1982), The Classical Farm (1994), That Old-Time Religion (1997), as well as a welcome body of new work.

About Scenes From a Long Sleep:

"Didsbury's is the kind of work which makes you realise what you've been putting up with in the meantime. The product of a large and peculiar imagination, it shows a sense of adventure hardly to be paralleled in contemporary poetry...In Didsbury's work there is glimpsed an alternative history where Catholic Europe and the East are strangely mixed, where matters of faith and damnation are still alive...its power to delight, terrify and enlighten comes from a way of seeing for which most contemporary categories are meaningless."
—Sean O'Brien, London Magazine

"Some of his invention is pure play, some hints at a rich, humane vision of England which yields a kind of surrealism all of its own: estuaries, farms, country estates, city streets and bedsits, a kind of tatty or compromised pastoral are detectable in Didsbury's oblique, desperate celebrations."
—Alan Jenkins, Observer

"WIth his unique way of seeing, Peter Didsbury is still one of the wisest, if also one of the most eccentric and unpredictable, of English poetic holymen."
—Ian Sansom, TImes Literary Supplement