Angry Planet

Charles Bennett’s environmental sequence of poems set as a large scale choral cantata by composer Bob Chilcott and featured in the BBC Proms 2012. The Angry Planet is the latest collaboration between award-winning poet Charles Bennett and composer/conductor Bob Chilcott. The poems capture poignant and powerful aspects of landscape to develop a mood of celebration and mourning. Through a vivid and haunting blend of dream-vision poetry, mischievous riddles and difficult questions, they explore our relationship with the natural world through evoking a journey through darkness towards dawn.

 

Charles describing Angry Planet

Charles and Bob on Angry Planet.

Key moments in the sequence give voice to endangered species, as well as celebrating the overlooked. The elegiac character of the poems, which include a requiem for the dead in the animal kingdom, is balanced with swagger in the dramatic monologues for weeds, and these opposing registers are themselves working against poems with a pithy, angry character. The whole sequence ends with the word ‘Perhaps.’

To order the book – which contains all the poems, an introduction from Bob Chilcott, hauntingly beautiful woodcuts by leading Norfolk artist Diane Griffiths, plus a detailed commentary on every poem revealing the sources behind the composition of the work – simply contact Charles.