I just read and enjoyed Amy Cutler’s paper on industrial remains in 20th-century British poetry, originally presented at a TAG conference in Durham in 2009.

Peter Riley is a poet whose work I’m not familiar with, but I love this verse from Tracks and Mineshafts (1983):

Every faint gesture rebounds on us

leaving a vacant hollow in the world:

possible, unfulfilled acts embedded

in the tissue, growth points too late –

the land is riddled with failed promises

and premature returns.

To read the paper, click below:

Amy Cutler, “‘The landscape is riddled with failed promises / and premature returns’: industrial remains in Ted Hughes’ Remains of Elmet (1979) and Peter Riley’s Tracks and Mineshafts (1983)”