Plastiglomerate

Tim Cresswell
Penned in the Margins

Like the collection’s titular object, the poetic objects in Cresswell’s Plastiglomerate are moulded, melted, fused together, bearing traces of the conditions in which they were produced. The very idea of a plastic rock is in itself a marker of the intertextuality this Anthropocene brings: a melding of the un-same—human-made plastic and organic substance. Whether in the enmeshment of human and more-than-human ecologies, or more literally in the use of found text and borrowed shape, the intertextuality between words and world, ecology and industry, provides the fulcrum of Cresswell’s collection.

‘The Two Magicians’, for example, takes its mandate of two separate entities—nature, the wild, the woman who would not be had, and culture, industry, the man who would have her—from the medieval source text, and demonstrates how they are inextricably fused together. ‘She’ sweeps and grows across the page as ‘he’ defends against her with the rigidity of inventories and land policies, until ‘she’ has the last word in the unavoidable climax of invasive enmeshment—a widening gyre of ecological end-time madness fused with lyrics from Bruce Springsteen and Patsy Cline songs, and ‘worry’.

This confident wielding of form does carve out space for softer moments, porous poems that allow for the unsaid to echo through the breaks in lines and between stanzas. Grief at the way things are going is fused with acknowledgement of beauty in the processes that catch the poet’s eye. In a tender address to an iceberg, ‘Erratic’ speaks of the damage done to and by the whole ‘Stowaway, suspended as the world / warmed leaving you upended— / culture-shocked and supersized’, while also acknowledging beauty: ‘Your crystals milky, opaque, glittering. / Brimming with another kind of / winter.’

In ‘Scale’, the micro and macro are so interwoven that one cannot help but feel hopelessly overwhelmed at the mess of it all, and yet here, too, is a kind of sorry beauty. The closing poem, ‘Blues for Lost Birds’, is at first glance a tender lament for bird species we think of as common. But the sifting disruption of repetition with altered syntax builds an uneasy sense that we’ve lost more than we think, and culminates in the last line taken from a popular folk song: ‘The cuckoo she’s a pretty bird, she warbles as she flies / The cuckoo was a pretty bird, she never said goodbye’.

This is a timely collection of poems that bury into the crevices of ecological enmeshment, find faultlines where one melts into, becomes imperfection in, the other: a poetic object of inextricably molten substances, some soft to the touch, some hard to touch upon—and yet still impossibly inevitable, as if normal has been newly cast from disparate agents.

—Loll Jung