TIM CRESSWELL
Tim Cresswell is a geographer and poet. He is the author or editor of over a dozen books on the themes of place and mobility. His most recent title is 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 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.
ALSO BY TIM CRESSWELL
POETRY
Fence (Penned in the Margins, 2015)
Soil (Penned in the Margins, 2013)
CRITICAL WORKS
Maxwell Street: Writing and Thinking Place (University of Chicago, 2019)
Place: An Introduction (Blackwell, 2014)
Geographic Thought: A Critical Introduction (Blackwell, 2013)
On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (Routledge, 2006)
The Tramp in America (Reaktion, 2001)
In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology and Transgression (University of Minnesota, 1996)
PUBLISHED BY PENNED IN THE MARGINS
Toynbee Studios, 28 Commercial Street, London E1 6AB
All rights reserved
© Tim Cresswell 2020
The right of Tim Cresswell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.
This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Penned in the Margins.
First published 2020
ISBN
978-1-908058-87-4
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
CONTENTS
In a Station of the Underground
In Brookline, Massachusetts, I learn a new route
Friendly Floatees / Tripadvisor
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to the editors of the following publications where some of these poems have appeared: Clarion, The Clearing, Frogmore Papers, Kudzu House Quarterly, Reliquiae, Sandy River Review, Soundings Review, Spiral Orb, Stare’s Nest, Stockholm Review of Literature, Tears in the Fence and Transfers.
I have benefitted from the input of many people while working on these poems. Thanks particularly to Suzanne Buffam, Philip Gross, Andrew Motion, Srikanth Reddy, Jo Shapcott and Karen Solie as well as all the participants at the Banff Writing Studio, Faber Academy, and Arvon workshops that I attended. I have benefitted enormously from the critical input of members of Tom Daley’s Monday poetry group in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Jim Finnegan’s Brickwalk Poetry group in West Hartford, Connecticut. Thank you to Julia Barton for supplying the plastiglomerate for the cover of this book.
Plasti-
glom-
erate
first the carnage
silverwhite trees wave-toppled and gale-gusted
strewn along the beach sun-bleached dinosaur bones
next the balancing acts of stonestacks a lone conifer
clings to invisibly thin soil knots of bull kelp
fetid and fly-ridden anemones in rock pools
beckon me to finger their sticky tongues
a bald eagle circles hounded by ravens
we keep on holding on hoping