Winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection
Poetry Book Society Recommendation
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.
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's début collection is 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… This is a collection that will resonate long after you have finished reading it' – Jackie Kay.
‘Nick Drake shows a talent for capturing the suffering and loneliness of people, and the instantaneousness of events…His Czech roots and friendships with AIDS victims add particularity and worldliness to his elegies and love poems’ – Sarah Wardle, Poetry Review.
‘Culturally eclectic and socially engaged, The Man in the White Suit is exciting stuff…a highly effective wit with a serious agenda’ – Peter Lawson, Times Literary Supplement
'Nick Drake's first collection is impressively rich in character and narrative, bringing together a haunting array of mysterious figures and stories… Never sentimental, he is especially good at loneliness, absence and exile' – Jamie McKendrick & Maura Dooley, PBS Bulletin.
Nick Drake on being Nick Drake
Nick Drake 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. 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.
Nick Drake: poems on climate change
Nick Drake reads six poems on climate change, all from Out of Range, beginning with three Arctic poems written following his participation in Cape Farewell’s trip to Svalbard, ‘Fold up the charts’, ‘the ice core sample’ and ‘Dear mortals’, followed by ’Stranger Thing’ (on the Whitechapel Fatberg), ’Still Life: Plastic Water Bottle (used), and ‘Chronicle of the Incandescent Lightbulb’. 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.
Nick Drake: poems on love and loss
Nick Drake reads six poems on love and loss: ‘The Very Rich Hours’ and ‘The Cure’ (from The Man in the White Suit) on the loss of friends to AIDS, three love sonnets, ‘This Love’, ‘A Glass of Water’ and ‘Rainbird’ (from From the Word Go), and ‘From the Song Dynasty’ (from Out of Range) on the lifelong love of two men in medieval China. 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.
Nick Drake: four poems from Out of Range
Nick Drake reads four poems from his most recent collection, Out of Range: ‘Maenad’, ‘The Foley Artist (take two)’, ‘Grace’ and ‘The Back of Your Head’. 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.
Nick Drake reads 'The Farewell Glacier' from the Arctic
This video by Matt Wainwright was shot during the Cape Farewell 2010 Arctic Expedition, and shows Nick Drake aboard ship reading one of the poems he wrote during the voyage. Five marine scientists and ten artists from around the world – writers, musicians, visual artists, directors and architects – sailed from Longyearbyen around the north-east coast of Spitsbergen in the Norwegian Arctic to encounter the magnificence of this extreme and threatened environment and engage with the scientific research being conducted on board.
