Soil

Geography and language collide in Soil, the debut collection of poetry by Tim Cresswell. His poems delight in the strange and are often situated at the cusp of the natural and urban worlds. A fox climbs to the top of a London skyscraper; municipal trees are displaced from their mountain habitats; 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 an innovative flair.

Already an acclaimed academic and human geographer, this book introduces Tim Cresswell as a significant new poet of place, and our changing relationship to it. Soil is a striking debut – rich, multi-layered, full of organic life and the compacted detritus of the city.