Was and Is Collected Poems

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.

In preparing this volume, Neil Powell has returned to his poems of the past fifty years and arranged them as nearly as possible in chronological order of completion. Some poems from previous volumes have been set aside, while others hitherto unpublished or uncollected have been introduced. The resulting book is partly 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 now resonate with each other in new and unexpected ways.

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 previous collections of poetry – of which the most recent is Proof of Identity (2012) – as well as Carpenters of Light (1979), Roy Fuller: Writer and Society (1995), The Language of Jazz (1997), George Crabbe: An English Life (2004), Amis & Son: Two Literary Generations (2008) and Benjamin Britten: A Life for Music (2013). He lives in Suffolk.