Proof of Identity

Neil Powell

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781847770950
• eBook ISBN: 9781847776556
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• 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
• About the Author
• Also by Neil Powell from Carcanet Press
• Copyright