Was and Is (Paperback) - Neil Powell

Neil Powell - critic, biographer and, pre-eminently, a poet of calm force. Now playful, now elegiac, his Collected Poems is a testament to civility. His landscapes and seascapes, his sense of music and friendship, root in the reader's memory.

Winner of the 2017 East Anglian Book Award for Poetry. Winner of the 2017 East Anglian Writers 'Book by the Cover' Award. There are two kinds of Collected Poems, one of which presents an author's work exactly as it first appeared volume-by-volume. This is the other sort. Neil Powell has re-examined his poems of the past fifty years, arranging them as nearly as possible in chronological order of completion while adding a rather larger handful of hitherto uncollected work. The resulting book is, on one level, the narrative of a lifetime in which certain themes, seen in changing lights, recur: landscape and seascape, music and poetry, friendship and the deaths of friends. Ranging from the playful to the elegiac, these poems are now able to resonate with each other in new and unexpected ways.

About the Author

Neil Powell was born in London in 1948 and educated at Sevenoaks School and the University of Warwick. He has taught English, owned a bookshop and, since 1990, been a full-time author and editor. His books include seven collections of poetry - At the Edge (1977), A Season of Calm Weather (1982), True Colours (1990), The Stones on Thorpeness Beach (1994), Selected Poems (1998), A Halfway House (2004) and Proof of Identity (2012) - as well as Carpenters of Light (1979), Roy Fuller: Writer and Society (1995), The Language of Jazz (1997), all published by Carcanet Press, and George Crabbe: An English Life (Pimlico, 2004) and Amis & Son: Two Literary Generations (Macmillan, 2008). His centenary life of Benjamin Britten will be published by Hutchinson in 2013. He lives in Orford, Suffolk.