Poems in which the post-industrial landscape of England’s north-east  comes alive through its many contradictions – Brexit and EU regeneration grants, sacred and secular, concrete and visionary – and also finds wider resonance as a symbol of human fragility, humour and perseverance.

‘All the birds

we didn’t have names for

in that flat above the roundabout

have found their way

to this sweet parenthesis

within smelling distance of the sea.

‘There is a type of nostos – that classical trope of the return home after great trials exemplified by The Odyssey – which does not involve exile in the literal sense, but rather a transformation or correction of the imaginative terms in which ‘home’ is seen. The corrigenda referred to in the title of Jake Morris-Campbell’s first collection enact a series of poignant yet utterly unsentimental versions of this internalised return, in which it’s not so much that he’s been away, it’s more that everything has either changed, or needs to be. On the one hand, as he portrays, Austerity and Brexit has done particularly fell work to the North-East, psychologically as well as economically. On the other, this is a poetry charged with an intense, almost visionary apprehension of the region as a poetic polity.

‘He is constantly achieving a sort of synoptic view that on the one hand imagines his parents in a 80s nightclub about to be obliterated by Soviet nuclear missile strike, and on the other sees him reinventing the roads and motorways of the region as pilgrimage routes for the haliwerfolc of the Palatinate.

‘His work is as much influenced by literary antecedents like William Martin and Anne Stevenson as by more familiar presences like Bunting, Pickard, or MacSweeney, and he shares with lyric contemporaries like Peter Armstrong and Gillian Allnutt a sense of the sacred as something pervading the secular and post-industrial landscape. In this sense his work both positions the North-East as a major literary territory, and adds to its achievement.’ – W.N. Herbert

‘Flaming out of the specificity and music of place, this is a work of wonderful vibrancy, wroughtness and resonance.’ – Jacob Polley