O luminosity of chance!
Light spins among the spider-plants
As sand or amber glow seeps through
Tall windows of a studio,
While on the beach in random rows
The enigmatic stones compose
A silent staveless variation,
The music of regeneration.

In Neil Powell's fourth collection he celebrates his loved Suffolk landscapes and seascapes; he includes a major, heartfelt thank-you letter to Music; he revisits childhood places; and he provides a group of anecdotal `True Stories'. There are elegies for Roy Fuller and Adam Johnson. The concluding poems explore ecological themes, large changes which from our perspective are indistinguishable from decay.

The Stones on Thorpeness Beach builds on the achievement of his earlier Carcanet books, At the Edge (1977) and A Season of Calm Weather (1982), described by Andrew Motion as
`professional, serious, and distinguished'. Of True Colours (1991), John Greening wrote in Poetry Review:
`Powell catches the windy melancholy of East Anglia, its loneliness, its rigour. His music is always delicately judged . . .'