Corrigenda for Costafine Town

RSL Ondaatje prize-longlisted collection published by Blue Diode Press, 2021.

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.

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.