Halfway House

Powell Neil

Houses and gardens, remembered or imagined, dominate Neil Powell's sixth Carcanet collection: his grandmother's home in Chelsea, a magical childhood garden in the Surrey hills, an abandoned, fog-shrouded building on the East Anglian coast. There is a sequence of sonnets set in the Waveney valley and a series of epigrams arranged as an alphabetical catalogue raisonnes. Friends are recalled, birthdays celebrated, and the collection ends with a moving elegy for the poet's father.

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 and Son: Two Literary Generations" (Macmillan, 2008). His centenary life of Benjamin Britten will be published by Hutchinson in 2013. He lives in Orford, Suffolk.

Reviews

"An exceptional poet of place, and of the East Anglian coast in particular: Neil Powell's Selected Poems thoroughly defines the peculiar atmospheres of that bleak landscape and seascape..." – New Statesman

"He shares Larkin's obsession with sunlight, pastoral nostalgia and fascination for edges, especially that edge where the land undemonstratively gives way to the sea" – Times Literary Supplement

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