"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."