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I got this off the “to be read” pile where it has been for about 18 months a couple of weeks ago as I was going to be sending time in Cardiff – I didn’t see much of the City as work commitments kept my tied up in the City Centre. Therefore this wander around the edge of the City was mental exercise.
It put me in mind of Edgelands by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts which I read back in 2012, and used as a prompt for the Northern Leg Liturgies in 2013.
What is it that keeps drawing me back to these explorations of the edge? A lot of this could be put down to growing up in Barnet with a lot of ‘edgeland’ spaces around me.
I think it is also interesting the ways the Peter Finch uses the character of the border to have conversations with, and about, the centre. The way that the City presents itself at certain parts of its border, and absences itself at others says a lot.
Is this a ‘COVID’ book – yes and no – yes because the walking took place in the tail of the restrictions, in some places it was a more lonely walk that it would be in ‘normal’ times, and attention to the local was one of the things the global pandemic, briefly, gifted us. But it is not confined by COVID – if it gets a second print run I think it is unlikely that COVID will be in the first sentence of the blurb on the back – other conversations about the validity of borders in our changing geopolitics might come to the fore instead.
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