Search results for ""Author Neil Powell""

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. 'Do you mean to say you've married / an apprentice fitter and come all this way?' an official asks the poet's grandmother who, trusting to luck, emigrates to a new life in South Africa after the First World War. An ironic and grateful presence, Powell observes the lives that he inherits. Perspectives shift with time: an old photograph shows his mother 'more beautiful and happier than I remember her', his father 'looking for once the statesman he should have been'. At the heart of the book is a compelling narrative based on a journal kept by Powell'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 is at his most versatile and memorable.

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Winner of the 2017 East Anglian Book Award for Poetry. Winner of the 2017 East Anglian Writers 'Book by the Cover' Award. There are two kinds of Collected Poems, one of which presents an author's work exactly as it first appeared volume-by-volume. This is the other sort. Neil Powell has re-examined his poems of the past fifty years, arranging them as nearly as possible in chronological order of completion while adding a rather larger handful of hitherto uncollected work. The resulting book is, on one level, the narrative of a lifetime in which certain themes, seen in changing lights, recur: landscape and seascape, music and poetry, friendship and the deaths of friends. Ranging from the playful to the elegiac, these poems are now able to resonate with each other in new and unexpected ways.

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Neil Powell fuses a critical look at language with an exploration of the political and existential problems facing humankind... The Storyteller is tired of telling stories about Love, God and Beauty. With the invention of Eric Crawford, an English teacher at Davenport College, he explores what is required to tell new stories. As a result, a tantalising world of freedom beckons. This encompasses Eric’s teaching, family and romantic life, the explosive relationship he has with troubled student, David Spurling, a protest movement about the role of Art, and a violent crime on college grounds. The Storyteller’s control of Eric’s life conversely makes the Storyteller realise the power language has over him. Reminding him that language is a public medium, not the exclusive tool of an authority or author. A stylistically innovative novel, at turns both a philosophy and black comedy, The Office of Future Storytelling, examines the relationship of language to individual identity and freedom. It argues that the stories we need are those which demonstrate our unequivocal connection to the world.

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The 2,500 year old Yi-jing or I Ching, translated as the 'Book of Changes', is an ancient Chinese work of divination and prophesy. Dating from the 4th century BCE, it is traditionally consulted by performing complex routines of dropping bundles of dried grass stalks. The particular patterns formed when six stalks are dropped are represented by 64 symbols called hexagrams, which show every possible combination of broken and unbroken stalks. The Book of Changes tells how to interpret the hexagrams to decide which is the best approach or action in a given situation. I Ching Illustrated features the 64 hexagrams and their successive interpretations, including the Judgment, written by King Wen in the 12th Century BCE, The Commentary and The Image (both attributed to Confucius, 6–5th Century BCE), and The Lines, written by King Wen’s son. Accompanying The Lines are present-day interpretative texts. Beautifully produced in traditional Chinese binding with 75 illustrations that make the perfect gift edition, this book will allow anyone fascinated by the traditional philosophies of the East to follow in the footsteps of Confucius and use the I Ching to predict their destiny.

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