Edgelands explores a wilderness that is much closer than you think: a debatable zone, neither the city nor the countryside, but a place in-between
- so familiar it is never seen for looking. Passed through, negotiated, unnamed, ignored, the edgelands have become the great wild places on our doorsteps, places so difficult to acknowledge they barely exist. Edgelands forms a critique of what we value as 'wild', & allows our allotments, railways, motorways, wasteland & water a presence in the world, & a strange beauty all of their own. Paul Farley & Michael Symmons Roberts
- both well-known poets
- have lived & worked & known these places all their lives, & in Edgelands their journeying prose fuses, in the anonymous tradition, to allow this in-between world to speak up for itself. They write about mobile masts & gravel pits, business parks & landfill sites in the same way the Romantic writers forged a way of looking at an overlooked
- but now familiar
- landscape of hills & lakes & rivers. Engl&, the first country to industrialise, now offers the world's most mature post-industrial terrain, & is still in a state of flux: Edgelands takes the reader on a journey through its forgotten spaces so that we can marvel at this richly mysterious, cheek-by-jowl region in our midst.