Fence

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.

'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