Overview

Plastiglomerate finds our world in the midst of environmental disaster: from plastic pollution and wrecked shipping to fires in the Amazon rainforest. Geographer-poet Tim Cresswell writes with the forensic eye of a professional, bending the hard vocabulary of science into a jagged but compelling lyric that telescopes from the vast to the cellular in the space of a line. Plastiglomerate completes a trilogy of poetry books that examines mankind's impact on the earth; its central poem recycles the British folk ballad 'The Twa Magicians' to make an ecological protest song fit for the Anthropocene age. But among powerful depictions of the natural world under threat - from beached whales to lost birds - it is the humanity of Cresswell's imagery that wins through: leaf-blowers in surgical masks, blue nail polish, the biro 'leaking in the heat of my pocket'. 'Engaging and unsettling poems that tell it like it is, looking unflinchingly at environmental beauty and disaster. There is redemption here too, in the warmth of human relationships - while this is indeed a world of 'ruin and plunder', it is also a place 'full of love and sap'. A powerful and memorable collection.' - Jean Sprackland

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9781908058768

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Reviews

'Poetry is there when we are broken; it charts and maps the damage. And lifts us from the mud or dirty beaches because of its honesty, brilliance and insight. This is a beautiful collection of interior thoughts processing what we don't want to know about the state of our damaged world. Cresswell is a traveller who takes us with him and points at what he has seen in a complexity of poetic voices that whisper in your ear, standing close by. With urgency and intimacy our climate crisis is there in our conscious and unconscious minds - and finds a powerful poetic witness in these works.'-Tania Kovats; 'Engaging and unsettling poems that tell it like it is, looking unflinchingly at environmental beauty and disaster. There are redemptions here too, in the warmth of human relationships - while this is indeed a world of 'ruin and plunder', it is also a place 'full of love and sap'. A powerful and memorable collection.'-Jean Sprackland; 'Plastiglomerate is a cursory reminder of the state we are in, that all places are in, told with a knowing, precise but also a deeply compassionate voice. Cresswell's integrity is carried by the truthfulness of what he names, the events that are mentioned, the debris that are listed, but also by the concern he has for the natural world and for those closest to him. It's a collection that is both protest and celebration.' GE Stevens, Caught by the River

Author Information

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.

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