Proof of Identity

Powell Neil

Neil Powell's seventh Carcanet collection explores the deep roots of identity: family histories we inherit, memories we carry, the casual decisions and wrong turnings that add up to make us who we are.

At the heart of the book is a compelling narrative based on a journal kept by the poet's grandmother of her life in South Africa: a feckless husband, a 483-mile trek with horse and covered wagon, violence and poverty. There's also a shorter, teasingly fictional narrative and a sequence about the life of a grand piano. Other poems deal with childhood, leaving home and first love; a park in Kent and a wood in Suffolk; an old photograph of the Strand and Louis Armstrong's first solo; the London bombers of 2005; and, finally, two old friends recalled in very different elegies.

Meditative, wry, melancholy and celebratory, this is Neil Powell at his most versatile and memorable.

About the Author

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 and 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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