The stillness of held breath is on the air,
While thunder gathers in the wings of autumn.
I know high cloud will slowly bleach the sky,
Leaves turn to russet, late apples ripen,
And light will never be quite like this again.


from `The End of Summer'
           

Neil Powell's poems, frequently informed by a topographical or historical sense of place, are rooted in love and friendship, in both celebratory and elegiac modes. They inhabit (to borrow Charles Tomlinson's phrase)
`a peopled landscape'.

His substantial Selected Poems draws on over thirty years' writing. It takes as its dedication Elgar's inscription on the score of the Enigma Variations:
`Dedicated to my friends pictured within'. The poems are drawn from four earlier Carcanet collections: At the Edge (1977), A Season of Calm Weather (1982), True Colours (1990) and The Stones on Thorpeness Beach (1994), as well as previously unpublished work. With its comprehensive scope and chronological arrangement, it stands as an interim Collected.

Andrew Motion described the first book as `a professional, serious, and distinguished
debut'. Of True Colours John Greening wrote in Poetry Review: `Powell catches the windy melancholy of East Anglia, its loneliness, its rigour. His music is always delicately
judged...'