Trouble in the Heartland

Trouble in the Heartland, Joel Lane's second poetry collection, inhabits the same West Midlands landscape as his first collection, The Edge of the Screen (Arc, 1999) - a landscape of urban decay, violence, loneliness, abuse, addiction and chaos. Chaos is a particularly prominent theme in this book; in the first section, the chaos is around us, in the second, inside us, while the third and final section attempts to draw the outer and inner worlds together in order to make sense of the whole. For all its unrelenting subject matter, this is a surprisingly optimistic book - carefully observed, sensitive and grimly witty - and one that will confirm Joel Lane's considerable talents as a poet.