Welcome to the latest Hercules Editions crowdsourcing campaign
Welcome to the latest Hercules Editions crowdsourcing campaign
“An exquisite love letter to this enigmatic region, The Dereliction uncovers tender moments in hidden places and reveals the beauty and mystery that lie unseen beneath the everyday”
Cerys Matthews
The Dereliction
by Liz Berry and Tom Hicks
Hercules Editions is pleased to announce the publication of The Dereliction by Liz Berry and Tom Hicks
The Dereliction is a love letter to the post-industrial landscapes of the Black Country. Liz Berry’s poems have been praised for their use of the vernacular, the twang of West Midlands dialect. Her poems are matched with Tom Hicks’s stunning photographs, part of his ongoing documentary photography project Black Country Type, that show the colours and textures of the post-industrial landscape. Together, their vision is a celebration of place which is as vital and lyrical as Wordsworth’s celebration of the Lakes.
The book is introduced by Black Country novelist and poet R.M. Francis, and also includes a conversation between Liz Berry and Tom Hicks about their collaboration and what their home territory means to them in terms of their work.
“Their shared territory is what tunes them – the lay of the land in the post-industrial Black Country. This duo takes us to places where urban decay and the weeds of semi-rural space compete for territory. They share a sense of pride and nostalgia for the area’s industrial heritage and working-class cultures. They share the conflicting feelings of despair and awe towards the ruins and waste grounds left like rusting archipelagos in sooty tides. They’re infatuated with the contradictory meetings of green and grey spaces, and the ways these clashes bring about emotive conjugations. In terms of cultural and geographical context, and in thematic content, they provide a sense of the borderless, the ghostly, the uncanny. But at the edges of this, just beneath or just behind, there is light, lustre, allure.”
R. M. FRANCIS
