Neil Powell's poetry is pared down to the most pared-down definition of poetry, much favoured by me, that poetry is writing where the author and not the printer decides where the lines end. It is largely free of extended metaphor, metaphysical argument, challenging allusiveness or any other difficulty that other poetry might be admired for. While never being culpable of the charge that it is 'chopped-up prose', it observes many of the principles attributed to 1950's Movement poetry, like the avoidance of grand gestures, a refusal to be flashy or unnecessarily literary and doing only what it needs to do. There's much to like about that and it can come as a welcome relief if one has been struggling with the likes of Craig Raine or Paul Muldoon. But then the thirty pages of The Journal of Lily Lloyd, presumably a memoir of his mother, can be read as prose. It defies any high-flown ideas of poetry as something sublime, intense or finely-wrought through its thoughgoing understatedness as poetry.
One wouldn't immediately think of calling Powell an extremist but he takes his undemonstrative method to an extreme. It's likeable, one appreciates the even temper but the Collected Poems lacks, as far as I can see, even the layers of qualifying irony of An Arundel Tomb, the sustained build of The Whitsun Weddings or the rigour of Thom Gunn's metrical verse. Larkin and Gunn are Powell's primary exemplars and yet he declines to be even as showy as them.
In The Picture of the Mind, as circumspect and well-made as any twelve lines, he says,
half-disclosing is what poems do,
and, yes, I like those that do that but Powell discloses, explains and doesn't leave very much mystery to wonder about. It would - thankfully- be a difficult body of work to set questions about because there is precious little interpretation left to ask of the reader. That can be something to be grateful for and one can appreciate the thought, the clarity with which it has been set out and empathize entirely with the sentiment expressed but, appreciation apart, no much else is asked of the reader.
Thev Lunatics' Compartment is one of many poems of anecdote, friendship and sincerity and its ordinariness generates something gently extraordinary, or at least of value.
Shell is memorable for being quietly ahead of its time in the light of books now appearing on the subject of life in a certain type of school for boys of Powell's generation and, I'm sure, before and since. It implies considerably more than it says but we know now even if the culture of the time inhibited revelations then.
Powell likes his music but sometimes tells rather than shows. For Music looks a bit like an exercise in name-dropping that any record collector might indulge in.
Without checking the dates, I'm sure that Outing is a reply to an Anthony Thwaite poem about the abundance of contemporary poets, and lists the perceived preponderance of male homosexuals in C20th culture. So, what,
That wasn't too exciting, was it?
are Powell's words, not mine. They could, for many, sum up the whole book but I think Neil Powell can be credited with being better than that. There is a time and place for gentility and while a new generation of creative writing graduates strain to find their next stunning, imaginative way of stretching the language, he is comfortable in what might look like a bygone style that nevertheless is less likely to become quite so quickly completely unfashionable.
I once heard Anthony Thwaite, in his characteristic way, throwing out the remark that Larkin was a Great Minor Poet (and I apologize if that is not verbatim but it was twenty years ago) and that may or may not be true. I think he compared Larkin to George Herbert in terms of 'status'. I wonder where that leaves so many others.
Being 'minor' is no offence. There is plenty to enjoy and maybe not all of us ever thought for one moment we would be the poet of our generation. Neil Powell offers a Collected Poems that is entirely coherent, lucid and sustained, that happily doesn't aspire to be anything it isn't and is the better for it compared to many that do.
