- Publisher: Penned in the Margins
- Edition: Second
- ISBN: 9781908058317
- Published: October 5, 2015
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 exploratory 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’.
Reviews
Experimental yet elemental poems.
Poetry Book Society Bulletin
Tim Cresswell creates a conceptual wilderness of words, held at the outer edge of experience, where natural and human history meet.
Philip Hoare
Postmodernist, postcolonial, poststructuralist, post-human, take your pick – there’s no turning back.
Srikanth Reddy
Fence 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 northen light: a fierce clarity of vision, combined with an awareness of things being uncannily off-scale and out of kilter.
Robert Macfarlane