Houses and gardens, remembered or imagined, dominate Neil Powell's sixth Carcanet collection: his grandmother's home in Chelsea, a magical childhood garden in the Surrey hills, an abandoned, fog-shrouded building on the East Anglian coast. There is a sequence of sonnets set in the Waveney valley and a series of epigrams arranged as an alphabetical catalogue raisonné. Friends are recalled, birthdays celebrated, and the collection ends with a moving elegy for the poet's father.

From reviews of Selected Poems:

'An exceptional poet of place, and of the East Anglian coast in particular: Neil Powell's Selected Poems thoroughly defines the peculiar atmospheres of that bleak landscape and seascape...' New Statesman

'He shares Larkin's obsession with sunlight, pastoral nostalgia and fascination for edges, especially that edge where the land undemonstratively gives way to the sea.' Times Literary Supplement