Edgelands: Journeys into England's True Wilderness - Hardcover

Roberts, Michael Symmons; Farley, Paul

3.9

473 ratings by Goodreads

9780224089029: Edgelands: Journeys into England's True Wilderness

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224089021 ISBN 13: 9780224089029

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2011

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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', and allows our allotments, railways, motorways, wasteland and water a presence in the world, and a strange beauty all of their own.

Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts - both well-known poets - have lived and worked and known these places all their lives, and 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 and gravel pits, business parks and landfill sites in the same way the Romantic writers forged a way of looking at an overlooked - but now familiar - landscape of hills and lakes and rivers. England, the first country to industrialise, now offers the world's most mature post-industrial terrain, and 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.

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Review:

`haunting, often inspiring book...Edgelands covers an impressive range of politics, reminiscence, investigation and rumination.' --Scotland on Sunday,

`a masterpiece of its kind'
`Even more uplifting is the chapter on weather - truly one of the most extraordinary passages of prose I have read in some time'
`This is, quite simply, beautiful, but it is also typical of a beautifully conceived work of exploration, by two emissaries to the wilderness who do the wasteland proud.'
--The Times

`a book that begs us to use our imaginations; to appreciate what we pass by every day but never really see' --Metro,

`in this marvelously quirky, fascinatingly detailed and beautifully written book the two authors fulfill their brief triumphantly' --Daily Telegraph

`this book is a delight: witty and wryly contrarian' --Guardian

`eye-opening and hugely enjoyable book ... overall this is an original, surprising and rather wonderful addition to our literature of place' --Sundat Telegraph

'Edgelands delights with its sly, impish wit and observation' --The Spectator

'This is a delightful and important book. By focusing on the fringes, on the shabby reality of suburban life, these poets remind us that there are always new myths for old, that the `edgelands' may even be our true centre.' --Country Life, John Greening

`A beautifully conceived work of exploration... Something of a masterpiece of its kind.' --The Times

`A highly inventive survey of landfill sites, wastelands, sewage plants, retail parks, golf ranges and other features of `England's true wilderness'. All this is done at a high level of linguistic resourcefulness, and the scope is impressive.' --The Financial Times

Book Description:

A book about the blank spaces on the A-Z, the hinterlands of Britain that are not urban and not yet country: the lost, the liminal and the unloved.

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