Lost and Found

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.