In a recent review of Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness, Robert Macfarlane remarks that the English scrubland between town and countryside is a theme that seems currently to be occupying the national consciousness. The border country that this book describes is the territory which people pass through on their way to other places; the no man’s land traversed by motorways and criss-crossed by telephone wires. Macfarlane is completely right: not only have two poets, Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, written a book about the edgelands, but the BFI is organising a short film festival on the subject of ‘liminal Britain’ later in the year.
The idea of edgelands immediately reminds me of Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Here’. The first stanza of the poem swerves ‘through fields/ Too thin and thistled to be called meadows’, pausing every so often at a ‘harsh-named halt, that shields/ Workmen at dawn’.
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