Nick Drake on being Nick Drake

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Nick Drake is a poet, novelist, screenwriter, dramatist and librettist, and has published four collections with Bloodaxe Books. His first book-length collection, The Man in the White Suit (1999), won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 1999, and was followed by From The Word Go in 2007. 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.

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. In this video, he 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. The other videos include poems on climate change [https://vimeo.com/320972260], on love and loss [https://vimeo.com/320973942], plus a selection from his most recent collection, Out of Range [https://vimeo.com/320975182].

For more information on Nick Drake’s poetry collections, please see: https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/category/nick-drake