"A distinctive, important new voice" - Jo Shapcott
Tim Cresswell's poems delight in language and geography, and the
collision point of the natural and the urban. A fox climbs to the top of
a London skyscraper; sandworts take root in abandoned mine shafts; and
geological time is glimpsed through the 'crushed structures' of the
city. Cresswell is interested in hinterlands, the in-between places:
airport lounges, urban parks, the muddy verge of a river. The title
sequence is a startling examination of man's relationship with the very
stuff of earth, redeploying the language of science and archaeology with
surgical precision and innovative flair. Soil introduces Tim Cresswell
as a significant new poet of place, and our changing relationship to it.
"If this poetry was a geological formation, it would be layered and
folded, with scientific knowledge and a quick linguistic wit, with
echoes of folk song, unsentimental ecological awareness, word games and
a sharp but not unkind eye on the everyday - all this, but metamorphic
too, fused by human warmth into a memorable voice."
Philip Gross
Tim Cresswell is Professor of Human Geography at Royal Holloway,
University of London. He is the author of four books on the role of
space and mobility on cultural life. Soil is his first collection of
poetry.
