Neil Powell

Brian Innes

Francis King

Fate and Fortune

The English poet George Crabbe, best known as the author of Peter Grimes and The Village, was also a surgeon, clergyman, botanist, and novelist. An ambitious, resourceful, self-made professional man, he devoted his middle years to his children and his increasingly ill wife, after whose death he embarked, at 60, on an astonishing second life. This new biography charts Crabbe’s progress from an impoverished provincial childhood to the excitement and sophistication of late 18th-century London; through his career as a ducal chaplain and country parson whose addictions included theater-going and opium; to his final years when, as a rector, he traveled widely, met major literary figures, and fell in love with some remarkable young women.

An English Life, 1754-1832

George Crabbe

When Roy Fuller died in 1991, there was general agreement: he was among the finest poets of his time, a novelist of importance, a man whose multi-stranded career - literary, cultural, professional - was exemplary. And he had been undervalued: he never quite, in his self deprecating phrase, 'caught on'. Early in 1990 Neil Powell approached him with a proposal to write a 'literary biography' - revaluing the work in the context of the life - and received his blessing. Drawing on unpublished letters and journals and on all the published sources, Roy Fuller: Writer and Society provides the first integrated account of an astonishing life's work. All the books of poetry are discussed, with close readings of vital individual poems; and the novels receive sustained attention. A fascinating and at times hilarious story of his other careers unfolds: as provincial schoolboy, solicitor's clerk, law student; wartime Navy radar engineer in England and East Africa; post-war solicitor and legal director of Woolwich Building Society; Oxford Professor of Poetry; BBC Governor; Chairman of the Arts Council Literature Panel. This book offers an authoritative study of a major writer and a portrait of a wise, wry, complex and likable man in his volatile world.

Writer and Society

Roy Fuller

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

Houses and gardens, remembered or imagined, dominate Neil Powell's sixth Carcanet collection. They range from a recollection of his grandmother's home in Chelsea to an abandoned, fog-shrouded building on the East Anglian coast; from a magical childhood garden in the Surrey hills to the composer Gerald Finzi's orchard in Hampshire. There is a sequence of sonnets set in the Waveney valley and a series of varied epigrams arranged as an alphabetical catalogue raisonne. As so often in Neil Powell's work, the North Sea laps at the edges of poems lit by the great Suffolk sky. Friends are recalled, birthdays celebrated, and A Halfway House ends with a moving elegy for the poet's father.

A Halfway House

The author relates his work with dogs in mountain search and rescue, drowned victim recovery, collapsed structure searching, and optical disc and drug detection situations over the past 40 years in Ireland, the UK, and elsewhere.

One Man and His Life-saving Dogs

Search Dogs and Me

Kieron Connolly

The I Ching is an ancient Chinese work of divination that examines the patterns, or hexagrams, traditionally formed by dropping bundles of dried grass stalks. This edition features interpretations of the 64 hexagrams, including the Judgment, written by King Wen in the 12th Century BCE; The Commentary and The Image (both attributed to Confucius); and The Lines, written by King Wen's son, and here enhanced by modern commentary.

The Ancient Chinese Book of Changes

The I Ching

John James

We need a bigger vision for the city. Pastors Neil Powell and John James contend that to truly transform a city, the gospel compels us to create localized, collaborative church planting movements. The more willing we are to collaborate across denominations and networks, the more effectively we will reach our communities—whatever their size—for Jesus.

Neil Powell

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