Description
Fence is an epic of fragments that is at once beautiful and beautifully strange. In his exploration of the vast, frozen Svalbard islands, poet and geographer Tim Cresswell has created a kind of travel poetry whose taut, minimalist lyric synthesises subjects as diverse as history, politics and Arctic ecology. Echoing the mournful atmospherics of the great Anglo-Saxon elegies, this book-length poem is a powerful meditation on places that are slipping away, where 'compass gone haywire / so north'.
About the Author
Tim Cresswell was born in Cambridge in 1965 but didn't stay there long. Since then he has travelled, first as part of an Air Force family and then as a student and academic. As a geographer he is the author of five books on place, mobility and other key ideas in geographic thought. From 2006 to 2013 he was Professor of Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he also completed a PhD in Creative Writing. He lives with his wife and three children in Boston where Tim is Professor of History and International Affairs at Northeastern University. Widely published in magazines, his first collection, Soil, was published in 2013 by Penned in the Margins.
Reviews
'Tim Cresswell creates a conceptual wilderness of words, held at the outer edge of experience, where natural and human history meet. Geographically positioned, physically evoked, his poems are visceral excisions, carved out of history and blubber and ice. They are what we meet when we fall off the earth's edge, a nowhere place where the whales take over, freighted with our shared past.'; PHILIP HOARE; 'I read Fence with a growing sense of fascination and disorientation. It is a strange and spectral volume, zigzag and jigsaw in its textures, strabismic in the sense of eerie slant that it gives to both landscape and language, born as it is of a fence that separates nowhere from the now and here, deep in the high Arctic. Moving through its poems, one experiences something of the doubling dissimulation of northern light: a fierce clarity of vision, combined with an awareness of things being uncannily off-scale and out of kilter.'; ROBERT MACFARLANE; 'We enter Tim Cresswell's Fence through a crescent of posts. Postmodernist, postcolonial, poststructuralist, post-human, take your pick - there's no turning back. An archaeology of disorder, a history of false claims, and a geography of no man's land, Fence makes a new music of 'our clickety-clack / filling the wind / like we had misplaced / the space around us and thought / we might find it."; SRIKANTH REDDY
Book Information
ISBN 9781908058317
Author Tim Cresswell
Format Paperback
Page Count 64
Imprint Penned in the Margins
Publisher Penned in the Margins
About the Author
Tim Cresswell was born in Cambridge in 1965 but didn't stay there long. Since then he has travelled, first as part of an Air Force family and then as a student and academic. As a geographer he is the author of five books on place, mobility and other key ideas in geographic thought. From 2006 to 2013 he was Professor of Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he also completed a PhD in Creative Writing. He lives with his wife and three children in Boston where Tim is Professor of History and International Affairs at Northeastern University. Widely published in magazines, his first collection, Soil, was published in 2013 by Penned in the Margins.
Reviews
'Tim Cresswell creates a conceptual wilderness of words, held at the outer edge of experience, where natural and human history meet. Geographically positioned, physically evoked, his poems are visceral excisions, carved out of history and blubber and ice. They are what we meet when we fall off the earth's edge, a nowhere place where the whales take over, freighted with our shared past.'; PHILIP HOARE; 'I read Fence with a growing sense of fascination and disorientation. It is a strange and spectral volume, zigzag and jigsaw in its textures, strabismic in the sense of eerie slant that it gives to both landscape and language, born as it is of a fence that separates nowhere from the now and here, deep in the high Arctic. Moving through its poems, one experiences something of the doubling dissimulation of northern light: a fierce clarity of vision, combined with an awareness of things being uncannily off-scale and out of kilter.'; ROBERT MACFARLANE; 'We enter Tim Cresswell's Fence through a crescent of posts. Postmodernist, postcolonial, poststructuralist, post-human, take your pick - there's no turning back. An archaeology of disorder, a history of false claims, and a geography of no man's land, Fence makes a new music of 'our clickety-clack / filling the wind / like we had misplaced / the space around us and thought / we might find it."; SRIKANTH REDDY
Book Information
ISBN 9781908058317
Author Tim Cresswell
Format Paperback
Page Count 64
Imprint Penned in the Margins
Publisher Penned in the Margins
