Soil

Tim Cresswell is a geographer and poet. He is the author or editor of over a dozen books on themes of place and mobility including, most recently, Maxwell Street: Writing and Thinking Place (University of Chicago Press, 2019). His poems are widely published on both sides of the Atlantic including in The Rialto, Poetry Wales, Magma, the Moth, LemonHound and Salamander. His two previous collections of poetry, Soil (2013) and Fence (2015) were both published by Penned in the Margins. He co-edits the interdisciplinary journal GeoHumanities and is the first Visiting Professor at the Centre for Place Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University Tim lives and works in Edinburgh where he is Ogilvie Professor of Geography at the University of Edinburgh.

'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, Winner of TS Eliot Prize 2009 'Tim Cresswell's poems unsettle. They cause us to relocate ourselves poem by poem as we encounter contemporary landscapes, airports, city streets, domestic interiors, layered in Cresswell's unique geological, poetic timeframe, and all made strange and testing by his brilliant and spare language. The central, major title sequence 'Soil' works through rhythms of space and light which stretch time so that the experience of reading these poems is utterly transforming. A distinctive, important new voice is announced in this debut collection.' Jo Shapcott, Winner of Costa Prize 2010