Fence

"A spectral volume, born of a fence that separates nowhere from the now and here, deep in the high Arctic" ROBERT MACFARLANE "Tim Cresswell's poems unsettle ... A distinctive, important new voice" Jo Shapcott 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’.