Was and Is

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 Some poems from previous volumes have been set aside, while others hitherto unpublished or uncollected have been introduced.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

NEIL POWELL was born in London in 1948.He was educated at Sevenoaks School, where he founded and edited the award-winning magazine Verve and wrote on jazz as a ‘young critic’ for The Daily Telegraph; and at the University of Warwick, where he read English and American Literature (BA, 1966–9) followed by postgraduate research on English Literature (MPhil, 1969–71).Between 1967 and 1970 he was editor of Tracks, and in 1969, while still an undergraduate, won a Gregory Award.He taught at Kimbolton School and St Christopher School, Letchworth, where he became Head of English; he was the founder-owner of The Baldock Bookshop in Hertfordshire; and since 1990 he has been a full-time author and editor, living in Suffolk. His books include eight collections of poetry – At the Edge (1977), A Season of Calm Weather (1982), True Colours (1991), The Stones on Thorpeness Beach (1994), Selected Poems (1998), A Halfway House (2004), Proof of Identity (2012) and Was and Is: Collected Poems (2017) – 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 edited and introduced the Selected Poems of Fulke Greville (1990), the anthology Gay Love Poetry (1997), the Collected Poems of Donald Davie (2002) and the Collected Poems of Adam Johnson (2003). He has contributed to numerous journals and newspapers including Agenda, Critical Quarterly, Encounter, Gay Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Listener, Literary Review, The London Magazine, New Statesman, PN Review, Poetry Review, The Spectator, The Sunday Telegraph and The Times Literary Supplement; to reference books such as British Writers, The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, The Dictionary of Literary Biography, The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry and The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; to various anthologies; and to BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4.He was for fifteen years Co-ordinating Editor of PN Review. Literary Agent Natasha Fairweather, Rogers Coleridge & White, 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN (020 7243 9517); natasha@rcwlitagency.com