Book review: Edgelands-- Journeys into England's True Wilderness

Sometimes it takes takes a poet or an artist to get us to look at something that's right in front of us. Such is the latest book that I am reading called Edgelands: Journeys into England's True Wilderness (Vintage Books, 2012). Deliciously written, the authors are English poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts. As children in the 1970s they wandered the industrial wastescapes of Liverpool and Manchester, which became their boyhood playgrounds. Today, they serve as literary ambassadors to escort us deep into these edgelands. Chapters are broken into landscape type or elements that are common to all edgelands: paths, dens, canals, ruins, pallets, wire, and containers. These forgotten lands and cast aside items are not the romanticized visions of Claude Lorraine ruins, these are real places in all their naked glory. But their text takes on an ugly beauty with texture and color, like watching a steel drum rust into a beautiful patina. Here's a sample from their Introduction, "Somewhere in the hollows and spaces between our carefully managed wilderness areas and the creeping, flattening effects of global capitalism, there are still places where an overlooked England truly exists, places where ruderals familiar here since the last ice sheets retreated have found a way to live with each successive wave of new arrivals, places where the city's dirty secrets are laid bare, and successive human utilities scar the earth or stand cheek by jowl with one another; complicated, unexamined places that thrive on disregard, if we could only put aside our nostalgia for places we've never really known and see them afresh."