Michael Symmons RobertsCritiques

A fine set of meditations on those lacunae and interstices of wildness, or at least less emphatically domesticated space, found on the urban periphery and sometimes near its core. Witty and entertaining with lots of fun observations. If you’re in the mood to visit, political, philosophical and environmental themes are there, like edgelands of the text. Despite the jolts the world has experienced since the book’s publication, edgelands, being outside the milieu, haven’t changed much. Long may that continue.

Beautifully written book by two poets. It describes the landscapes at the periphery of towns where the urban meets the rural. Well worth reading.

Roberts has written this collection of 150 poems, each 15 lines long, on a diverse range of subjects, from the everyday to the ethereal.

Roberts has a control and mastery over the English language that is astonishing at time. He manages to convey his meaning and feelings with scant few words.

There were a few poems in here that I liked a lot, and some that just washed over me. I put that down to my relative inexperience with poetry, rather than the quality of the writing. It is probably worth a re read after I have read some other poets.

Most of the non-fiction I read has an element of nature writing about it, but this book is rather more than that. Farley and Roberts aim is to reclaim and celebrate the edgelands that surround our cities, and the book is a fascinating account of the way landscapes are developed either by human intervention or by nature reclaiming what is left behind after human activity.

Both writers are poets, so the book is inevitably reflective and personal, despite the joint authorial voice which makes it impossible to deduce who wrote which parts of it. Many other poets and artists are cited.

Each chapter has a one word title encapsulating its theme - most of them specific human activities ranging from den-building and mining to hotels and airports, and the whole makes a fascinating portrait of the England that many of us take for granted.

Powerful short book, where the whole is more than the sum of its parts -- the common themes (of the body, decay, food, resurrection) resonate from poem to poem. Like his other book Drysalter, the impact slowly builds and layers as you read through. A true feast for the mind and spirit, no wonder this won the Whitbread when it was published.½

I sometimes on the advice of an old friend just pick up books at the library which I had no intention or knowledge of before I went in there. Edge lands falls in that category and I didn't care if I read it or not - because only borrowed. However, it has become the downstairs book and you can read a chapter whenever. Inventively mines into the nooks and crannies of England that you recognise but perhaps only because the writers drew your attention to them.

There are a few really top class poems here, but sadly they're lost in the poor quality of the rest of the work. The collection needed a much stronger editor and a significant amount of culling.

food for risen bodies
_
rarer still some blind white crabs

not bleached but blank, from such
a depth of ocean that the sun would drown

if it approached them. Two thirds
of the earth is sea: and two thirds of that sea away from currents, coasts and reefs
is lifeless, colourless, pure weight

150 poems each of 15 lines, mostly with a slightly unsettling atmosphere, explore the worldly and the spiritual and the conenctions between. Not only great poems individually, but a rare collection which forms a cohesive whole.

The two authors, both poets, describe the overlooked places on the edges of towns and cities and in-between. The titles of the chapters will give you an idea -- cars, paths, dens, containers, landfill, water, sewage, etc. Whilst this might not sound like an interesting subject matter for a book, it is the very fact that we as adults consciously ignore these spaces that makes it so refreshing to hear it written about.

Like the authors, I found a sense of nostalgia in some of the subjects which as a child I might have had the leisure and curiosity to explore. Increasingly our lives are being spent in these edge lands, and it is clear that more could be done to understand them, appreciate them, and make them spaces we could feel comfortable in.

The writing is excellent, as you might expect from vignettes written by poets. The short chapters make it a good book for dipping in and out of, but a flip- and down-side of this is that the book as a whole may lack a little coherence -- there is no overall point the authors are trying to make. But then that is of course reflective of its subject matter...

An enjoyable book maybe even a worthy one but in the end a feeling of disappointment. Two poets write jointly in an anonymous duet about the pleasures to be found in the landscape surounding our urban habitats. They tap into the experiences of many of us who have wandered into these unloved, unkempt but familiar zones. They encourage us to appreciate the man made wildness that is so close to us. But in the end they fail to kindle the necessary spark. Mainly because they don't rely enough on their own personal experience. They describe too much on too broad a canvas. They fail to sufficiently reminisce, they fail to stand, stare and appreciate the minutiae of where they are and where they spent their childhoods.