This glassblower’s cheeks are bulbous as Dizzy Gillespie’s
As he forms what must surely be a blue glass flask.
He’ll add four feet, two ears, blob eyes, a curly tail,
And seal the aperture to create a stumpy snout.

But in truth he’s ruined it: that slit along the back
Turns it into a piggy-bank, a glowing deep-blue toy.
‘It would be great as a pig, without the slit,’ says the boy.
‘Okay’ – and the glassblower smiles – ‘for you I make one.’
    from ‘The Lindshammar Pig’

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.

Proof of Identity
The Lindshammar Pig
Hotel Codan
Me and Mr Jones
The Break
At the Piano
Kempas Highway, 1966
In Sudbourne Wood
Parkland
Knole
Blackborough Park
The Boy on the Bus
Strand, 1923
Louis Takes a Break
The Journal of Lily Lloyd
The Gardener
Shutting Down
A Huntingdonshire Elegy
Point-to-Point