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The Man in the White Suit

Forward Prizes for Poetry

The Man in the White Suit

Nick Drake

The Man in the White Suit is a poetry collection that moves through identity, irony, and urban observation. Its restrained voice lets image and repetition build emotional pressure.

identityironyurban observationsharp observation

Work Information

A compact poetry collection shaped by identity and irony.

The Man in the White Suit returns repeatedly to identity, irony, and urban observation, building a collection from exact images and low-key tension. The result is controlled on the surface but lingering in its aftereffects.

Book Information

Publisher
Bloodaxe Books
Published
1999-04-29
Pages
63 pages
Language
英語
Size
13.97 x 0.64 x 22.23 cm
ISBN-13
9781852244880
ISBN-10
1852244887
Price
2483 JPY
Category
洋書/Literature & Fiction/Poetry/British

An exiled poet in an English seaside asylum… A winter night spent in the spooky penthouse suite of Ceausescu's vanished daughter… A scientist trying to calculate the heart's square root… All these figure in The Man in the White Suit, Nick Drake's first full-length collection, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. It portrays and celebrates a richly varied cast of characters whose secrets and histories are the central thread of the book, ranging from life studies of those caught out by exile from central Europe or caught up in the strange aftermath of the 1989 revolutions, to intimate love poems and portraits of those learning the arts and mysteries of dying.

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.

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