Full Description
Nick 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.
Contents
9 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
