Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, two well-regarded British poets, set out in Edgelands to explore those forgotten spaces that exist between city and countryside: neither one nor the other we know them mainly as wastelands, business parks, canals, power stations; places we generally ignore, seen most often from a car or train seat, or in the shoot-out at the end of a gangster film.

The book does not seek to glorify them, but it does seek to redress the balance. Cities are where we live, countryside is where we visit, but the edgelands are passed through and passed over. Much of what we consume comes from there, and much of our waste ends up there, if we do stop in an edgeland it is usually for functional reasons such as air-travel or car-scrappage, and though sometimes the purpose is pleasure, stadiums and exhibition centres can be found there, we rarely consider the surroundings.

Following a short introduction, the main body of Edgelands is made up of a 20-something mini-essays which each examine a different aspect of this liminal landscape: ‘Masts’, ‘Ruins’, ‘Bridges’, ‘Sewage’ etc. These essays mix anecdotal vignettes with philosophical meditation and descriptive flourishes to given an elegant snap-shot in the space of less than 10 pages per subject. The writing is as economical and evocative as would be expected from two experienced poets, and their decision to write together in one voice moves the narration into the background and allows the scenery to speak for itself.

Thankfully they make no attempt to hide their major shared interest: poetry. Though it never intrudes on the main subject, most chapters include a short diversion to a relevant poem or poet; with Larkin, understandably given that poet’s propensities, appearing more than most. Farley and Roberts are also both possessed with the poet’s eye for startling juxtaposition, and this is used to great effect to move beyond the immediate area at hand and look at wider considerations, pulling back for a wide-shot as it were, perhaps most poignantly at the end of the chapter on landfill: “We are everywhere, even in the air. Those beautiful sunsets in our western skies are caused by the sun’s rays travelling obliquely through the atmosphere at its deepest, pickup up, in among all the fly ash and pollen and particulate, our human dust.”

By giving a collective name to these places Farley and Roberts encourage us to see what we previously missed, and to offer us the chance to “explore these places of possibility, mystery, beauty.” They succeed in this goal admirably, and take the reader on a fascinating and enjoyable journey in the process.

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