Exploring the deep roots of identity, thispoetry collection by Neil Powell touches uponinherited family histories, memories, and the casual decisions and wrong turns that make us who we are. From subjects such as childhood, leaving home, and first love to a compelling narrative based on a journal kept by Powell s grandmother of her life in South Africa, this compilation demonstrates how perspectives shift with time. Other includedpieces discuss the London bombers of 2005, the life of a grand piano, and elegize two old friends. Meditative, wry, melancholy, and celebratory, this is Powell at...

Benjamin Britten was the greatest English composer of the twentieth century and one of the outstanding musicians of his age. Born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, in 1913, Britten was the youngest child of a dentist father and amateur musician mother. After studying at the Royal College of Music, he became a vital part of London's creative and intellectual life during the 1930s, collaborating with W. H. Auden and meeting his lifelong partner, the tenor Peter Pears. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Britten and Pears were already in America, earning a precarious living as freelance musicians...