Edgelands

I finally got round to reading Edgelands by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts last week. I had never heard of the authors before now, not being up on the contemporary British poetry scene, but they have done a decent job. The book is divided up into short chapters on different aspects of the edgelands - the landscapes on the edge of conurbations used for dumping, sewage works, power stations, business and retail parks etc; it therefore covers prime Blandland territory.

The authors take more of a celebratory tone than may appear in this blog, hymning for example the beauty of power station cooling towers, which is understandable, but some of their praise seems defiantly perverse. The more whimsical musings I found hard to take - these would never be found in the work of Iain Sinclair, whose work they clearly dislike for its 'flaneurism', although they rarely seem to engage with their chosen areas as lucidly and closely as does the father of English psychogeography (a term he's uncomfortable with I know); I detect a whiff of envy.

Nevertheless there are a number of interesting and stimulating passages on satellites, lofts, pallets and weather. It's also good that they concentrate on the north and midlands rather than the all-too-familiar London and the south east. As with so many modern books I could have done with a bibliography/list of interesting websites - many poets, artists and photographers are name-checked in the text and I've been following up the ones I was unfamiliar with online. Also I really think some photographs or other images might have improved it, given the number of references to those who work in these (increasingly fashionable) territories. I deliberately haven't used that overworked adjective 'liminal' - I don't think the authors do either, to their credit.

Maybe I'm too obsessed with information gathering but I could have done with more hard facts and statistics about such topics as waste disposal, which is the one of the major 'businesses' of the edgelands; but this book is supposed to be more a work of poetry than an academic exercise, a good thing as there are some historical errors. On the whole I think it's a worthwhile collection, but not as original as may be supposed by the casual reader - I wonder though whether it will make much of a long-term impact (I've included in the essential texts section on this site). There's a review which I mostly agree with here (Robert Macfarlane is also one of the authors that they are attempting to subvert), one from the Telegraph here and another by Marion Shoard who came up with the term 'edgelands' with a video of the authors talking about the book here.