- Publisher: Penned in the Margins
- ISBN: 9781908058768
- Published: June 8, 2020
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’.
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