Assembly Lines

by Jane Commane

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781780374093
Publisher:	Bloodaxe Books
Publication date:	03/01/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	64
File size:	173 KB

About the Author

Jane Commane was born in Coventry and lives and works in Warwickshire. Her first full-length collection, Assembly Lines, was published by 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 Brontë 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 (with Jo Bell) of How to Be a Poet, a creative writing handbook and blog series. In 2017 she was awarded a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship.

Table of Contents

Here, once 9

National Curriculum 10

Sand 15

On the New Bypass 16

Fabrikgeist 17

The Shop-floor Gospel 18

Coventry is 20

Midlands kids, 22

Our Old Lady of the Rain 23

Love Song for the Ordnance Survey 24

Border Dispute 26

On Discovery 27

Odds On 29

Seven Horse Secrets 30

Dog, on First Being Named 31

The hearts of everyone in this room 32

Script Notes from the lost episode of The Future 33

UnWeather 34

Reasoning 37

Three Sketches for Dreams 38

Double Exposure 41

Gasbagging 42

Folklore 43

Shrug 44

Flow we fell in love with big data 45

How the Town Lost Its Song 46

The poem written to settle an old score is 49

Lonely Hearts 50

Landmarks 51

Disturbed 52

Dresden Papers 53

The Ghost Light 55

Otters, Avon 56

Shrapnel 57

Around the Rectory 59

Circa 60

Homing 61

Poem in which a small dog looks into the sun 62