Soil

"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.