A Halfway House

Houses and gardens, remembered or imagined, are images that dominate Neil Powell's collection of poems. His work ranges from an evocative recollection of his grandmother's home in Chelsea to a fog-shrouded building on the East Anglian coast, from a magical childhood garden in the Surrey hills through a sequence of sonnets set in the Waveney valley. As is typical of his poems, a sense of place is evoked--the great brooding North Sea laps at the edges of these poems lit by the glowering expanse of Suffolk sky. Friends are recalled and birthdays are celebrated in this work, which ends with a moving elegy for the poet's father.