Assembly Lines

Longlisted for the 2019 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize

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.

'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

‘Coventry poet Jane Commane’s Assembly Lines captures the desolation haunting Midland towns and indeed the whole state as Brexit looms.’ – John Gohorry, Morning Star (Poetry Books of the Year 2018)

‘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

‘For all its apparent focus on the past, I think Assembly Lines is very much about the here and now: a patchwork of contemporary perspectives on the past, assembled in ways that might illuminate the present. A first rate debut.’ – Paul McDonald, Envoi

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, and was longlisted for the 2019 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize for a distinctive first book of poetry. 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. In 2025 she received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors, a prize recognising the achievement and distinction of individual poets.