The poems in The Farewell Glacier grew out of a journey to the High Arctic. In late 2010 Nick Drake sailed around Svalbad, an archipelago of islands 500 miles north of Norway, with people from Cape Farewell, the arts climate change organisation. It was the end of the Arctic summer. The sun took eight hours to set. When the sky briefly darkened, the Great Bear turned about their heads as it had for Pythias the Greek, the first European known to have explored this far north. Sailing as close as possible to the vast glaciers that dominate the islands, they saw polar bear prints on pieces of pack ice the size of trucks. And they tried to understand the effects of climate change on the ecosystem of this most crucial and magnificent part of the world. Nick Drake's new collection gathers together voices from across the Arctic past - explorers, whalers, mapmakers, scientists, financiers, the famous and the forgotten - as well as attempting to give voice to the confronting mysteries of the high Arctic: the animal spirits, the shape-shifters and the powers of ice and tundra. It looks into the future, to the year 2100, when this glorious winter Eden will have vanished forever. Many of the poems from The Farewell Glacier are included in ground-breaking High Arctic exhibition, installed at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich from July 2011 to January 2012, which received substantial national publicity, including a feature on BBC Radio 4's Front Row and national press reviews.

About the Author
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 premiered 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.

Reviews
The Farewell Glacier makes your spine shiver... The subject of climate change might not grab your attention, but with its footprints on the polar highs and two spoons of iceberg The Farewell Glacier will melt the hardest heart. * Wales Arts Review *
A highly distinctive volume, The Farewell Glacier is a poetic exploration of European voyages to the Arctic, weaving together historical expeditions with voices Western, indigenous and animal, and Drake's own experiences in the far North, territory where 'the light suffuses everything.' Drake tackles big questions - when does exploration become exploitation? What of global warming? 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 *



Book Information
ISBN 9781852249335
Author Nick Drake
Format Paperback
Page Count 64
Imprint Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Publisher Bloodaxe Books Ltd