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Fence

Tim Cresswell author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Penned in the Margins

Published:23rd Oct '15

Should be back in stock very soon

Fence cover

Fence is an epic of fragments that is at once beautiful and beautifully strange. In his exploration of the vast, frozen Svalbard islands, poet and geographer Tim Cresswell has created a kind of travel poetry whose taut, minimalist lyric synthesises subjects as diverse as history, politics and Arctic ecology. Echoing the mournful atmospherics of the great Anglo-Saxon elegies, this book-length poem is a powerful meditation on places that are slipping away, where 'compass gone haywire / so north'.

'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

ISBN: 9781908058317

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

64 pages