Assembly Lines

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 Morley