num_pages: 256
description: 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.
language: English
title: Edgelands
publisher: Jonathan Cape