A vivid thread runs through the heart of the poems in Nick Drake's Tipping Points . The accelerating changes, transformations and metamorphoses – the tipping points – of the climate emergency are here and now, all around us, in the great systems and mysteries of Nature, in the ancient powers of the elements, in our rivers, forests, gardens and oceans. And at the heart of these bewildering changes lies a profound, shared sense of loss.
Tipping Points explores and charts those fears and sorrows, but it also takes the reader on a progress of reconnection, exploring pathways to the future, celebrating those who are making change happen, and discovering new possibilities and balances of alarm and wonder, of destruction and re-enchantment, and of what’s lost but what might yet be saved.
Inspired by a belief that the imagination is our shared superpower, Tipping Points looks out to a world in flux and inwards to the human, intimate tipping points of the heart.
Tipping Point s is Nick Drake’s fifth collection from Bloodaxe. The Man in the White Suit won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. The Farewell Glacier , his full-length poem about a voyage in the Arctic, was adapted for performance at COP 26, and for BBC Radio 3. Out of Range included his poem ‘The Future’ recorded by Andrew Scott. Nick co-wrote the feature film One Life starring Anthony Hopkins, Johnny Flynn and Helena Bonham-Carter. He has written opera librettos and radio plays, and his lyric ‘The Gathering Tree’, set by composer Rachel Portman, received its world premiere at the Last Night of the Proms.
'Nick Drake has established a reputation for profound engagement with that trickiest of cultural endeavours. Formulating a creative response to the climate crisis. His poems consider human nature, its ingenuity as artifice, our capacity for enacting violence on other humans as well as on this biosphere, whether actively or by omission.' – Nancy Campbell, ClimateCultures [on Out of Range ]
'[Poems] of gentle genius; to read them is to live more vividly.’ – Anna Funder on The Farewell Glacier
'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 [on Out of Range ]
'Words by the wonderful poet Nick Drake.’ Petroc Trelawney on ‘The Gathering Tree’
‘Resonates with the profound sorrow so many of us are feeling right now in the wake of the wildfires. At the same time, this painful sense of loss is balanced by poems that enchant and lift the spirit.’ – Elizabeth Barton on ‘Ghost Forest’
‘A highly distinctive volume… As with Alice Oswald’s Dart , this volume is a serious re-thinking of what the long poem can do in the 21st Century.' – Dulwich Books Reviews on The Farewell Glacier
‘A scintillating collection of poems… If you care about words, if you care about the impossibility but the nobility of trying to express the ineffable in language that is accessible but that stuns, then haunts you, buy this book.’ – Lloyd Rees on ‘From the Word Go’
‘He deserves careful attention as one of the poets likeliest to maintain England's ever-trans-shifting but still splendid poetic tradition.’ – Harvard Review
Nick Drake on being Nick Drake
Nick Drake reads his poem ‘Live Air’ (from his collection From the Word Go ) about the other Nick Drake, the 70s singer-songwriter whom he has sometimes been mistaken for, and then discusses all the other sides of being this Nick Drake, not just a poet but a writer known for his work in many other fields and yet with poetry being his first love. Pamela Robertson-Pearce filmed him reading poems from his Bloodaxe collections at his home in Hackney, London, in February 2019. These are split into four sets posted as separate videos.
Nick Drake: poems on climate change
Nick Drake reads six poems on climate change, all from Out of Range , beginning with three Arctic poems written following his participation in Cape Farewell’s trip to Svalbard, ‘Fold up the charts’, ‘the ice core sample’ and ‘Dear mortals’, followed by ’Stranger Thing’ (on the Whitechapel Fatberg), ’Still Life: Plastic Water Bottle (used), and ‘Chronicle of the Incandescent Lightbulb’. Pamela Robertson-Pearce filmed him reading poems from his Bloodaxe collections at his home in Hackney, London, in February 2019. These are split into four sets posted as separate videos.
Nick Drake: poems on love and loss
Nick Drake reads six poems on love and loss: ‘The Very Rich Hours’ and ‘The Cure’ (from The Man in the White Suit ) on the loss of friends to AIDS, three love sonnets, ‘This Love’, ‘A Glass of Water’ and ‘Rainbird’ (from From the Word Go ), and ‘From the Song Dynasty’ (from Out of Range ) on the lifelong love of two men in medieval China. Pamela Robertson-Pearce filmed him reading poems from his Bloodaxe collections at his home in Hackney, London, in February 2019. These are split into four sets posted as separate videos.
Nick Drake: four poems from Out of Range
Nick Drake reads four poems from his most recent collection, Out of Range : ‘Maenad’, ‘The Foley Artist (take two)’, ‘Grace’ and ‘The Back of Your Head’. Pamela Robertson-Pearce filmed him reading poems from his Bloodaxe collections at his home in Hackney, London, in February 2019. These are split into four sets posted as separate videos.
VIDEO
Nick Drake reads 'The Farewell Glacier' from the Arctic
This video by Matt Wainwright was shot during the Cape Farewell 2010 Arctic Expedition, and shows Nick Drake aboard ship reading one of the poems he wrote during the voyage. Five marine scientists and ten artists from around the world – writers, musicians, visual artists, directors and architects – sailed from Longyearbyen around the north-east coast of Spitsbergen in the Norwegian Arctic to encounter the magnificence of this extreme and threatened environment and engage with the scientific research being conducted on board.
Ireland & EU: Click here
USA: here click here
×
