Fourth collection from the York-based poet.
Robert Powell's fourth collection is full of wide-ranging surprise in
tone, colour, and subject - from times gone by to the times we're in,
from England and Finland to the troubled Irish Border, from deeply
personal recollection of children and childhood to a vision of death
stalking arrogant political power. These poems mark him out as one of
the finest and most consistent poets working today.
'In Robert Powell's Lost and Found, the world is often dreamlike and
the ordinary consistently made strange, reflecting the often surreal
events of contemporary living in a world saturated with technology.
Meanwhile the past continually invades the present, in poems that are
always arresting, full of simultaneously precise and surprising images.
There is a beautiful music to Powell's writing, each poem a "bright song
sung."'
- Hannah Lowe, author of The Kids and Chan
'In this latest collection Robert Powell is breaking new ground... Each
poem becomes an unrepeatable event which, maybe paradoxically, echoes in
the mind like a stone chucked into a deep well. Enjoy these poems and
inhabit them, as Powell does.'
- Ian McMillan, host of BBC Radio 3's The Verb
Then the President asked: Why won't anyone talk to me about Death?
There was a long silence. I will, I said stepping forward.
The gilded room drained of lackeys, bodyguards, hacks.
Then we sat alone and he leaned close, eyes wide,
like a child listening to a bedtime story.
When we last saw him silhouetted on the dawn sky,
the President was a seething pillar black with flies
from capital to base; and the bitter air all over our land
tasted something like hope
something like expiation
something like grief.
