Proof of Identity

Reviews / Votes

Voices from the past: poetry and all that jazz.

One day in early April, 1923, seven jazz musicians in Richmond, Indiana, huddled around some recording apparatus and made musical history.

The young second coronet player was put at the back, so as not to drown out the trombonist and clarinet player.

As Suffolk poet Neil Powell writes; 'Then something happens: Louis takes a break./ The hot news from America fills our ears:/ A sound too proud and noble to mistake,/ Through all the wow and flutter of the years.'

The title of the track was Chimes Blues, the group was King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band and the moment - preserved for posterity - was Louis Armstrong's first recorded solo. 'Louis Takes a Break' is jazz-lover Powell's take on the occasion and, in a sense, the poem provides the signature tune of this, his seventh collection with Carcanet Press.

Poem after poem retrieves an object or moment from the past and 'through all the wow and flutter of the years' casts them in new, poetically resonant, light. But whereas Satchmo was the great showman, Powell has a quieter, albeit celebratory, presence. He delights in allowing the objects and anecdotes themselves to do much of the talking while he pulls the poetic strings with the eye and the ear of a skilled craftsman. Family history and memories loom large - turning points which are not recognised as such until gilded with narrative significance years after the event.

Born in London in 1948 and educated in Kent and at the University of Warwick, Powell worked as a teacher and owned a bookshop before becoming a full-time writer and editor.

At the centre of his new book is a long narrative, The Journal of Lily Lloyd, based on a notebook kept by his grandmother about her journey to and experience of life in South Africa. The poet retains as closely as possible the vocabulary of her journal, while casting it into 11-syllable lines. The result is a compelling 'first-person' account of poverty, a feckless husband and the vivid minutiae of day-to-day life minted afresh in the luminous context of an extended poem.

Powell is fascinated by the way the past speaks to us now. An old photo provides the inspiration for another poem, 'Strand, 1923', which shows crowds and open-topped buses. Its final image is beautifully rendered: 'And no-one has noticed the photographer -/ Except, from the back of a wagon,/ Propped among sacks and packages, the grocer's boy/ Smiles shyly at the camera and the future.'

The poet is content to let the image take the strain and doesn't burden the moment with any extended authorial reflection on the nature of time and poignancy of a face from the past smiling at us today. The rhyme of 'photographer' and 'future' is enough, poetically, to take the moment out of time and seal its significance.