Out of Range

Nick Drake was born in 1961. He lives and works in London. His first book-length collection, The Man in the White Suit (Bloodaxe Books, 1999), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 1999, and was selected for the Next Generation Poets promotion in 2004. From The Word Go was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2007. His recent projects include a stage adaptation of Philippe Petit’s To Reach the Cloud; the screenplay for the Australian film Romulus, My Father, starring Eric Bana, which won Best Film at the Australian Film Awards; Success, a play for the National Theatre's Connections project; and a trilogy of historical novels (Nefertiti, shortlisted for CWA Best Historical Crime Novel, Tutankhamun and Egypt: The Book of Chaos). In September 2010 he was invited to join Cape Farewell's trip to the Arctic to explore climate change, and from that journey arose a commission from United Visual Artists to create poems and texts for their ground-breaking installation High Arctic at the National Maritime Museum (2011). Those poems, together with others inspired by the Arctic and its voices, are gathered in his collection The Farewell Glacier (Bloodaxe Books, 2012). His fourth collection, Out of Range, was published by Bloodaxe in 2018. He is also a screenwriter, and worked as a librettist in a collaboration with the composer Tansy Davies and director Deborah Warner on Between Worlds, an opera inspired by the events of 9/11 premièred by English National Opera at the Barbican Theatre in April 2015, winner of the 2016 British Composers Award for Stage Work. A new music theatre collaboration with Tansy Davies followed, Cave, performed at Printworks London in June 2018.

This 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.

• 9 Through the Red Light10 Inklings11 Chronicle of the Incandescent Lightbulb13 Maenad15 Still Life: Plastic Water Bottle (used)16 Ollamaloni18 Dance19 The Palace of Memory21 From the Song Dynasty23 With Helen and John at Kelvingrove25 Saturday Morning26 London Fields27 For Sandra28 Peaches for the Solstice30 The Flies32 Shame33 In Medellín34 Night Bus36 Driving to Achiltibue38 Cormorants39 Out of Range41 Anubis43 The Foley Artist (take 2)45 The Dancing Satyr47 Self-portrait as a Moose48 Three Arctic poems53 Grace55 Send56 Life on Earth58 Fragile59 Stranger Thing60 Colibri61 The Back of Your Head63 Notes