31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not Nick " Pink Moon" Drake, January 9, 2002
By A Customer
This review is from: The Man in the White Suit (Paperback)
I just wanted to tell everyone who was wondering that this book is not written by Nick Drake (the singer songwriter from the 60's). I ordered it thinking that it was in fact by him, but it's someone with the same name. The poetry is good, but it isn't by 60's Nick Drake which was dissapointing when I bought it.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A trip to Europe--cheap, March 21, 2001
This review is from: The Man in the White Suit (Paperback)
Americans should know that Bloodaxe is the dominant force in serious British poetry. So Bloodaxe Book's publication of Nick Drake's first major collection, The Man in the White Suit, can give us yanks a sense of what's out there in British verse now. It's hard to resist comparisons between Drake's poems and our American oeuvre, so why resist? His poems don't follow the typical American improvisational free-verse or formal free-verse styles. He takes the latter and ups the formal stakes, going for the rhyme and apparent, though seldom regulated meter, and using alliteration and assonance with confidence. His stanzas make sense as units, and the line breaks are free from enjambment and abruption. Stylistically like Ransom and Penn Warren, a Fugitive gentile elegance is in these poems. But the themes in this book seldom find their home in English settings. They take place in Continental Europe: a conflation of pop culture iconography with Elvis and Dracula on a "Mystery Train" to Transylvania, and a haunting musing on power's closest victim's in "Ceausescu's Daughter's Bedroom". These aren't the Left Bank and Rome poems of American poetry chic. These are poems of a real Europe, "Europe's concrete jigsaw, time- and war-zones." And Jigsaw puzzle is what we have in this book, with no customary delineations of parts or sections. Each poem, is set in a different place and offered by a different speaker-again in contrast to the contemporary American desire for thematic unity as seen in McCombs Ultima Thule and Jordan's Carolina Ghost Woods, two finalists for the Times Book Critics' Circle prize. Each poem in The Man in the White Suit is a piece of an elusive bigger something, hard at first to see when the box is just opened and spilled across our imagination's table. But if we remember the picture on the cover, the poet promises we'll see it soon enough. And most will.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent debut., January 25, 2007
This review is from: The Man in the White Suit (Paperback)
Nick Drake, The Man in the White Suit (Bloodaxe, 1999)
The Man in the White Suit is a decent enough book that just goes on about its merry way until roughly halfway through, when Drake (no, not the singer of Pink Moon, more's the pity-- I don't think this Drake was yet born when that one shuffled off this mortal coil) hits you with "Heaven (for Mark Wilson White, 1957-1994)," and you realize you may well be in the presence of greatness:
"They showed us up, shadows in our dark suits
as through North London's traffic we progressed
past the chorus line of incredulous angels
at the bus stop, the shining parade
of shop windows, and the syncopated lights
until we turned down into Jordan Road.
I was a lamentable accompanist
ruining Nina from Argentina,
unable to keep time or find the notes;
he'd smile and offer: that was nearly perfect" ...
You wonder where, exactly, this came from, look back at the slight, usually amusing pieces before it, and realize it's all been some grand setup for Drake, who's been playing the patsy, to catch you with a roundhouse. Immediately the book starts landing a flurry of body blows before tapering back off into lighthearted wit again. It does taper off, though (in intensity, mind you, not in talent). Which is good, because sixty-four pages of Nick Drake at his harshest might be enough to send you screaming for the razor blades, and I mean that in the best possible way.
This is, like most of what one finds published by Bloodaxe, an ugly piece of work with lots of rough edges that one simply can't find a way to mesh with the décor in the conservatory, dahling. This, of course, is what makes it almost unbearably attractive, and well worth your time. ****
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