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: