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.