Assembly Lines
Published on 22. February 2018
Book
Paperback/Softback
64 pages
978-1-78037-408-6 (ISBN)
Description
Assembly Lines asks what it means to be here and now, in post-industrial towns and cities of the heartlands that are forever on the periphery. From schools and workplaces and lives lived in 'a different town, just like this', these poems take a historical perspective on the present day from the ground upwards - whether the geological strata that underpins a 'dithering island' or the ever-moving turf under a racehorses' hooves. This is a new Midlands realism, precision-engineered, which seeks wonderment in unlikely places. By turns both fierce and tender, the poems in Jane Commane's first book-length collection re-assemble the landscape, offer up an alternative national curriculum and find ghosts and strange magic in the machinery of the everyday. Between disappearances and reformations, the natural and the man-made, the lines are drawn; you might try to leave your hometown, but it will never leave you.
Reviews / Votes
Jane Commane's first collection Assembly Lines... enjoys the "commonplace miracles" of the ordinary people who make the wheels go round... The whole book is an elegy for a generation of "Midlands kids" who "grew up in the back seats / of the long-gone marques of British manufacturing"... -- Andy Croft * Morning Star * What a joy to read these poems and be led by Jane Commane through Edgelands Midlands - its secret geologies and ghostly factories, 'dog eared estate-avenues' and restless classrooms. In these vivid, fierce poems melancholy and unease spangle the Midlands air like dust and 'heartsick towns' search for new ways to be and begin again. The poems in Assembly Lines work with magic and tough tenderness and linger in the mind long after their shift is done. A shining debut from one of poetry's brightest guiding lights. -- Liz Berry Assembly Lines is a marvellous collection: mature, clear, brilliantly visioned in lost worlds of cities, lives and livelihoods. It speaks, almost telepathically, to the nation as it is and as it was: broken, divided, where the hope lies thinly and can be caught only in perception. This is writing as an act of community, even when the community may never listen or has never cared. Yet by default of these poems, where writing is also an act of attention, and attention an act of love, every poem here is a kind of love poem. It is like listening to a long solo in the dark. A song to the Midlands. -- David MorleyMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Tyne and Wear
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 5 mm
Weight
140 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-78037-408-6 (9781780374086)
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Other editions
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Person
Jane Commane was born in Coventry and lives and works in Warwickshire. Her first full-length collecton, Assembly Lines, is due from Bloodaxe in 2018. Her poetry has featured in anthologies including The Best British Poetry 2011 (Salt Publishing) and Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam (Cinnamon) and in magazines including Anon, And Other Poems, Bare Fiction, Iota, Tears in the Fence and The Morning Star. She has been a poet in residence at the Bronte Parsonage in Haworth, and has led many writing workshops in a variety of locations, including in museums, castles, city centres, orchards and along riverbanks. In 2016, she was chosen to join Writing West Midlands' Room 204 writer development programme. A graduate of the Warwick Writing Programme, for a decade she also worked in museums and archives. Jane is editor at Nine Arches Press, co-editor of Under the Radar magazine, co-organiser of the Leicester Shindig poetry series, and is co-author of How to Be a Poet with Jo Bell, a creative writing handbook and blog series.