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    The Farewell Glacier
    The Farewell Glacier
    The Farewell Glacier
    Ebook77 pages26 minutes

    The Farewell Glacier

    By Nick Drake

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    About this ebook

    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 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 were included in the 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. 'A scintillating collection of poems…a mastery of form and tone, and a simple, uncontrived unravelling of emotional and psychological complexities… If you care about words; if you care about the impossibility but the nobility of trying to express the ineffable in language that is accessible but that stuns, then haunts you, buy this book' -Lloyd Rees, Envoi. 'Subtle, funny and tremendously moving. He has an eye for the small detail as well as the big picture. These poems brilliantly evoke time and place' -Jackie Kay.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloodaxe Books
    Release dateApr 26, 2012
    ISBN9781780370538
    The Farewell Glacier
    Author

    Nick Drake

    Nick Drake is the author of Nefertiti and Tutankhamun, the first two books in the Rahotep detective trilogy. He has published two award-winning collections of poetry, and his play was performed at the National Theater in London. His screenplays include the critically acclaimed Romulus, My Father (starring Eric Bana), which won Best Film at the Australian Film Awards in 2007. He lives in London.

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      Book preview

      The Farewell Glacier - Nick Drake

      NICK DRAKE

      THE FAREWELL GLACIER

      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 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 were included in the ground-breaking High Arctic exhibition, installed at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich from July 2011 to January 2012.

      ‘Subtle, funny and tremendously moving. He has an eye for the small detail as well as the big picture. These poems brilliantly evoke time and place’ – Jackie Kay.

      COVER PHOTOGRAPH

      Nick Drake in the Arctic (2010) by Deborah Warner

      NICK DRAKE

      THE FAREWELL

      GLACIER

      For Edward Gonzalez Gomez

      Out of whose womb came the ice?

      And the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it?

      The waters are hid as with a stone

      And the face of the deep is frozen

      BOOK OF JOB XXXVIII 29-30

      You have to begin to change your mind to understand the Arctic

      BARRY LOPEZ

      We must travel in the direction of our fear

      JOHN BERRYMAN

      Contents

      Title Page

      Dedication

      Epigraph

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      PREFACE

      PART 1

      I sailed with the sun

      We sailed in carraughs, long and narrow

      I heard this story

      We sailed beyond knowledge

      I am the

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