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 & Son: Two Literary Generations (Macmillan, 2008). His centenary life of Benjamin Britten will be published by Hutchinson in 2013. He lives in Orford, Suffolk.
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Reviews
'Neil Powell's poems are lucid, elegant, formal and humane .' - Peter Scupham; 'His poetry has a rewarding range and depth, though memory and our ambivalent handling of memory is what he is best at. He is an elegiac poet, and in some ways a more valuable poet of loneliness than Larkin. Any younger reader who hasn't yet cottoned on to Powell should find this carefully considered 'Collected' rewarding: his is a quiet insistent voice at the heart of the tradition.' - John Fuller