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Edgelands [Paperback]

Michael Symmons Roberts (Author), Paul Farley (Author)
3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
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Book Description

Publication Date: 2 Feb 2012

The wilderness is much closer than you think. Passed through, negotiated, unnamed, unacknowledged: the edgelands - those familiar yet ignored spaces which are neither city nor countryside - have become the great wild places on our doorsteps.

In the same way the Romantic writers taught us to look at hills, lakes and rivers, poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts write about mobile masts and gravel pits, business parks and landfill sites, taking the reader on a journey to marvel at these richly mysterious, forgotten regions in our midst.

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.

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Product details

  • Paperback: 272 pages
  • Publisher: Vintage (2 Feb 2012)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0099539772
  • ISBN-13: 978-0099539773
  • Product Dimensions: 12.9 x 1.7 x 19.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 30,044 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Review

"This book is a delight: witty and wryly contrarian" (Robert Macfarlane Guardian )

"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" (John Burnside The Times )

"Marvellously quirky, fascinatingly detailed and beautifully written" (Daily Telegraph )

"The edgelands, where the veneer of civilisation peels away, are the most despised and ignored of landscapes. Ambition turns to dust in the sewage farm and landfill site. But Farley and Roberts's mischievous and elegant forays into these marginal wastes, show that dust turns back to life in them - into riotous ecologies, agitprop architecture and the wonderful business of playing. A provocative, left-field read" (Richard Mabey )

"Haunting, often inspiring book...Edgelands covers an impressive range of politics, reminiscence, investigation and rumination" (Scotland on Sunday )

Book Description

Shortlisted for the 2012 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and winner of the Foyles Best Book of Ideas Prize - this is a book about the blank spaces on the A-Z: the lost and unloved 'edgelands' between cities and countryside
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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
24 of 24 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars A new view on the Unofficial Countryside 20 April 2011
By SCM TOP 500 REVIEWER
Format:Hardcover
Edgelands is about those vague and undefined places that surround our towns and cities, damaged places, changing places, burnt, bombed and abandoned places - places that we pass through when going somewhere else.

This book comes as a natural extension of "The Unofficial Countryside" by Richard Mabey - a book which is referenced early in Edgelands and one which has clearly had an influence on the thinking of the authors. But while Mabey focuses on the natural places and spaces, the two authors of Edgelands focus on human spaces and impacts. If Maybe's book is an ecology of wastelands, then this book is about the sociology or even philosophy of the same spaces.

"Edgelands" are clearly a mixture of the native and the manmade, a synthesis of the natural and the artificial, and this mixture seems to have entered the nature of the book itself.

It may be just me, but I found that the authors reached for other people words just a little too often, so that the book becomes more of a synthesis of other people thoughts rather than the notably original synthesis that Mabey managed about the same (or at least similar) ground.

Now this does not make this a poor book - far from it, but I cant give it the rave review that other people have done.

In summary - this is an interesting, very well written book about an overlooked landscape. I would recommend it to anybody who has an interest in landscape history and / or philosophy, but I am not completely convinced that the book does not say many things that have been said elsewhere.
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63 of 65 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Journeys into England's True Wilderness 20 Feb 2011
By Daniel Brouiller
Format:Hardcover
In this, quite simply wonderful, book the poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts explore and reflect upon that familiar, yet often unknown terrain, between city and countryside. These are the 'Edgelands', found on the periphery of cities and larger towns; landscapes of wasteland, landfill sites, ruins, allotments and wild gardens, graffitoed road bridges, sewage plants, woodlands and unexpected paths.

Both writers, presenting a single narrative voice, capture beautifully, in elegant descriptive prose the essence of place. They are wide-ranging in their associations bringing in comments on modern culture and often introducing how other poets and writers - from Wordsworth to Seamus Heaney, have themselves encountered these places. They also introduce visual artists who have documented some aspect of 'Edgelands' territory. Other people's stories are occasionally woven in to the stories of the authors' own journeys.

I noted, from the acknowledgements, that the authors' editor at Jonathan Cape was the Poetry editor, Robin Robertson, and one can imagine the stroke of creative brilliance, on his part, in bringing together these two writers to create this book.

Here is just a taste - from the chapter on 'Ruins' of the way in which the authors put you right in a place and enable you to experience it, through your senses, for yourself:

'Pieces of broken glass click underfoot. Every few paces the floor becomes spongy with pads of mossess until eventually you're standing on a hard and level surface. The air smells cold and musty, uncirculated, tinged with motor oil, mildew, brick dust, black unguents. Somewhere high above, there's the ghost applause of a pigeon, before - a hundred yards or so in front of you - you hear the harsh metallic rattle of big shutters being rolled open'.

This is the best book I have read in 2011 so far and it may almost certainly prove to be one of my personal books of the year!
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28 of 29 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Places where your mother told you not to go 2 May 2011
By Red Stick
Format:Hardcover
I had some lingering doubts when 'Edgelands' was first published. Two poets trying to expose some of the wildnerness areas - and especially in the north west - that I'd come to regard as my own. Lyrical when lyricism just wasn't there or just an attempt to tart them up for wider public exposure. Rather selfish now I come to think about it - a bit like being really annoyed when somebody reveals a magically secluded and jealously guarded holiday spot.

Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts: to you I apologise. What convinced me to buy the book and to recommend it to others was your compelling reading on Radio Four's Book of the Week at the end of April. (I tuned in at 9.45 in the morning and, to the repeat at 12.30 at night when it was a delightful preface to the shipping forecast.)

In the opening chapter, the authors gave credit to where credit's due - to Richard Mabey for the originality of his work nearly 40 years ago, to Alan Berger's 'Drosscope' where the edgelands were set out in a uniquely American way, and to Marion Shoard who did what we'd all like to have done and added the word to our lexicon.

I've noticed, probably only in the last 12 months, how often real ctitics and reviewers of the arts have referred to something that's just a bit different or with a hint, perhaps, of the avant-garde as 'edgy'. Farley and Symmons Roberts have gone a lot further than that in taking us into places where we may once have hesitated to ventue. they have brought to us a new regard for often marginal areas which might have been dismissed as ugly, even threatening, wasteland.

For me, edgelands were often deserted marshalling yards leading from railway tracks, overgrown and neglected cemetries, abandoned pits or forelorn bakeries regarded as surplus to the requirements of the modern consumer. Readers of 'Edgelands' will make their own choice from the 28 categories that Farley and Symmons Roberts include in their book. Each one offers a different insight, a new perspective and a reminder that there is far more to England's sometimes not so green and pleasant land than perhaps we once thought. Sorry, I doubted you gentlemen and I'm delighted to put the record straight.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars Superb read
Engrossing story of the forgotten wastelands I remember from childhood, with memorable word-pictures of bag-blossomed trees, silent ponds and overgrown pits and quarries....
Published 25 days ago by J. N. Hennessy
2.0 out of 5 stars A trudge
The authors are at their strongest when they align their tour with literary insights - poetry and prose - from other authors, but this doesn't occur often enough to sustain... Read more
Published 2 months ago by rayc
5.0 out of 5 stars An unseen world out there
A LOVELY BOOK THAT OPENS YOUR EYES TO AREAS OF THE LANDSCAPE THAT WE CAN SO EASILY OVERLOOK. I RECOMMEND IT.
Published 3 months ago by LizO
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Book
Beautifully written book by two poets. It describes the landscapes at the periphery of towns where the urban meets the rural. Well worth reading.
Published 7 months ago by Half Man, Half Book
3.0 out of 5 stars Work in Progress
This reads like a work in progress: notes towards a poem that doesn't yet exist. There is no strong structure or sense of narrative. Read more
Published 7 months ago by Ian Brawn
5.0 out of 5 stars Well done the Edgelands poets!
I had bought this book imagining something very different than it turned out to be; seeing the incongruous dead rabbit on the cover, I had imagined some dark and gritty expose of... Read more
Published 9 months ago by jenny g
2.0 out of 5 stars Diffuse and generalised
If you're interested in those non-places that we're supposed not to see - the bits under motorways, up alleys, beside roads, around cities - don't read this book, read Iain... Read more
Published 11 months ago by Ms. L. R. Fisher
4.0 out of 5 stars Exploring Nature's Dark Corners
This came as a present, and I wondered whether it would appeal to someone who likes his nature raw and unsullied. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Sentinel
1.0 out of 5 stars Numbing and reductive
Though far from an original proposition - Richard Mabey's pioneering `The Unofficial Countryside' (1973) explores the half-hidden ecosystems of London's waste ground and industrial... Read more
Published 11 months ago by Clive Barton
5.0 out of 5 stars Edgelands
If you grew up in the North West (or probably any of the UK's other decayed industrial heartlands) this book will certainly strike a chord. Read more
Published 16 months ago by John Harry
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