Ice – John Barnie
ISBN: 9781911540281
£9.99
Set in a future that may not be too distant, the ice caps have melted and the Atlantic Conveyor of warm water from the tropics to the North Atlantic has collapsed, plunging North America and Europe into a new ice age.
Famine, death and conflict stalk the frozen continents, but in the city-state of Banda, one Assault Corps lieutenant questions the totalitarian regime, making himself vulnerable just as he meets and falls in love with Galathea, the embodiment of warmth and beauty absent from their society. As they begin to explore the forbidden past together, Banda braces for the next attack…
Ambitious and prophetic, this new edition of John Barnie’s verse novel, Ice, is increasingly urgent as scientist’s debate the possible catastrophe that global warming and human intransigence threaten to unleash. And in the midst of disaster, it asks what it means to be human and how or whether we can retain humanity in the most extreme of circumstances. Powerful and lyrical, Ice chills to the heart, yet there is beauty here, and love, if only humanity will choose it.
Ice is a global warning, a chilling prediction of the fate of humanity should we continue abusing the earth at the current rate.
Claire Powell, Poetry Wales.
If the poem is trying to tell us anything, it is that we invite in Death (which achieves an almost medieval personification in the poem), not Life when we violate our contract with nature and bury our natural human impulses under a layer of self-generated permafrost. It’s an argument with which we may be familiar but this beautifully realised poetic fable clinches it with the resources of a poet who has achieved his most impressive piece of work so far.
Nicholas Murray, New Welsh Review.
You can read an interview with John about Ice in the The London Magazine.
Author biography
John Barnie is a poet and essayist from Abergavenny, Gwent. John lived in Denmark from 1969-1982 and was the editor of Planet, The Welsh Internationalist from 1990-2006. He has published several collections of poems, mixed poems and fiction, and two collections of essays, one of which, The King of Ashes, won a Welsh Arts Council Prize for Literature in 1990. His collection Trouble in Heaven (Gomer, 2007) was on the Wales Book of the Year 2008 Long List. Cinnamon Press has published several previous collections:The Forest Under the Sea, The Roaring Boys, Wind Playing with a Man’s Hat, Departure Lounge, and Sunglasses as well as his latest collections, the richly illustrated Afterlives, A Report to Alpha Centauri. and The Dunes of Cwm Rheidol. John’s work has been translated into Italian, Danish and Estonian. He was poet in residence at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History for the year 2016. John also plays guitar in the blues and poetry group Hollow Log.