Was and Is : Collected Poems

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 2017East 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 Some poems from previous volumes have been set aside, while others hitherto unpublished or uncollected have been introduced.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.