Reclamations from London’s Edgelands

Abstract

Reclamations is an urban pastoral sequence of poems set in the Lower Lea Valley – an open green space within the bounds of the city, a geographic and social edgeland between town and country. The wreckage and remnants of war and urban infrastructure such as sewage works, filter beds, impounded and culverted rivers act as settings. The recycling of waste, absorption of floodwaters and presence of pits and burial grounds – vital features of the marshes for which they are devalued or shunned – figure in the poems, not as dead spaces or discarded processes, but as integral to ongoing renewal, of history alive and remade in the present. The people who populate the poems are also marginalised – ex-soldiers, redundant workers, displaced Travellers, migrants, asylum seekers – but it is traces of their presence left in the landscape and in the language which resonate in lyric and verbatim poems. Underlying the collection is the metaphor of reclamations – not only the process of reclaiming land from the marshes which the Olympics set in train, but the contested claims of whose land it is, the overlooked, suppressed or forgotten histories and voices embedded in the marshes. The sequence echoes their regenerative capacity to take in waste, rubble and flood waters and transform them into productive crafts, industries, recreations and a wild ecology, absorbing at the same time the marginalised, giving us a space to breathe and a place where we can feel at home.