Description
Book SynopsisNick Drake’s fourth collection, Out of Range, explores the strange interconnections and confronting emergencies – the signs, wonders and alarms - of the early 21st century. Here are elegies for the Whitechapel Fatberg and incandescent lightbulbs; the life stories of plastic bottles and ice-core samples; portraits of those living on the margins of the city streets, and of Voyager 1 crossing the threshold of the solar system. The past echoes in poems about the ancient artists who recorded their presence in cave art, a Spanish missionary thrilled by an Aztec ball game, and a story of gay love from the Song dynasty. Here too are poems registering the shock and impact of ‘Generation Anthropocene’ on Earth’s climate and ecology. Above all, the poems seek to tune in to what is out of range; the dark matter of mystery, wonder and deep time at the edge of our senses, at the back of our heads, which poetry makes visible.
Trade ReviewThis is absolutely modern poetry, at once haunting and unsettling, but in other places funny and moving. It weaves together these various strands of wonder and horror and in so doing, captures the confusion we all live with as we navigate the planet as human animals in the 21st century. * Oxford Poetry Library (Book of the Week) *
These poems celebrate proximity and distance - spatial, temporal or emotional - to remark on the state we're in. Written with poignancy, formal facility and intense honesty, they take the reader on a journey through known worlds and into unknown ones. -- Nancy Campell * ClimateCultures *
Nick Drake’s poetry is usually grounded in everyday contemporary experience, but his imagination also enjoys travelling, following the routes of good but accessible science. -- Carol Rumens * Poem of the Week, Guardian.com *
Table of Contents9 Through the Red Light 10 Inklings 11 Chronicle of the Incandescent Lightbulb 13 Maenad 15 Still Life: Plastic Water Bottle (used) 16 Ollamaloni 18 Dance 19 The Palace of Memory 21 From the Song Dynasty 23 With Helen and John at Kelvingrove 25 Saturday Morning 26 London Fields 27 For Sandra 28 Peaches for the Solstice 30 The Flies 32 Shame 33 In Medellín 34 Night Bus 36 Driving to Achiltibue 38 Cormorants 39 Out of Range 41 Anubis 43 The Foley Artist (take 2) 45 The Dancing Satyr 47 Self-portrait as a Moose 48 Three Arctic poems 53 Grace 55 Send 56 Life on Earth 58 Fragile 59 Stranger Thing 60 Colibri 61 The Back of Your Head 63 Notes
