Abstract
Tim Cresswell’s Soil is an intriguing debut collection that combines deep geographical knowledge and understanding with the kinds of specific details of an individual’s life in particular situations. A sequence of four poems, ‘Human Geography I, II, III and IV’, redefines and broadens the notion of the human and the geographies within which it might exist. Written in prose paragraphs and punctuated by a dash, details of a domestic family life are set against the international mobile life of the working academic, where clothes are left ‘piled on the landing, outside the room where my wife still sleeps’ so that he can dress quietly and slip away.
In the details of these poems the domestic home and its cycle of everyday activities is examined alongside the journeys out from that place as acts of discovery and environmental anxiety, and where the subject is projected into a geography they might never meet again but on which they leave a trace. On his return he refers to getting ‘back into the swing of things – shopping – kids to school’, where swing is a motion that never goes anywhere, but oscillates back and forth. There is a single lyric voice in the sequence, but there is also a clear concept of a specific moving human body that produces situations that can sustain their multiplicity, and the formal structure of the poem supports an uneasy and productive relationship between the speaking subject and its broader contexts.
The opening individual poems gather around familiar themes in contemporary poetry. The fox in the city, the water we drink, a fishing trip, the birth of a child and picking fruit and making jam are all good topics for an observational poem, and the observations are acute and sometimes funny and touching, but would benefit from more intensity of engagement with the subject matter. Similarly, those poems that come to the end of the book are a little too disparate in form and content to develop the varieties of focus that would make best use of the author’s understanding of issues of space and mobility.
The ‘Soil’ sequence, however, that gives its name to the collection although sometimes more awkward than the easy speech derived flow of the individual poems, begins to put the language under pressure, using a technical vocabulary and knowledge to engage with places in ways that intensify sensual and affective responses. This doesn’t mean the sequence is coldly scientific, on the contrary, it sets the scientific against the personal in another form of human geography. The horizontal classification of the soil horizon into A, B and C layers becomes an opportunity to develop the image of the worm, and the ways the shifting surface of topsoil leaches into the lower layers and to the bedrock through a process of ‘translocation’. The next poem, however, sustains the tensions between a physical and a human geography, developing a gothic nightmare of a ‘mother’ who is ‘up at night, out in the garden || gorging on ferrous earth’.
There is a lot to like in this collection, but for this reader it is in these two sequences that his ambition is best achieved. They are not only poetic in structure and the ways they make meaning, but can also take account of a perspective and knowledge that is thoroughly geographical. Recent connections and collaborations between geographers and artists of all sorts has demonstrated that they can work together to help explore the multiple meanings that ideas like ‘place’ and ‘mobility’ produce. This collection is evidence of a next stage, where the geographers become poets, and the poets become geographers, able to test out ideas and practices through the different contexts of the disciplines, and the interdisciplinary spaces that emerge.