Alistair Noon and Matthew Clegg will be giving a joint reading at The Red Deer, Sheffield, on Saturday 19 May (7.30pm prompt start; admission free). Berlin-based translator and poet Noon will present a selection of poems from his recent Longbarrow Press pamphlets Across the Water and Swamp Area (and Earth Records, his first full-length collection from Nine Arches). Clegg will be reading new and unpublished work from his sequences The Navigators and Chinese Lanterns. The two poets have devised an evening of journeys; from the urban waterways of South Yorkshire to the rivers, lakes and seas of Central Europe (and further afield), accompanied by Li Po, Coleridge, Mao and others. You can listen to Alistair Noon read extracts from Swamp Area here; a recording of Matthew Clegg reading ‘Li Po’s Letter to Rumi’ (from Chinese Lanterns) can be found here.

We’ve uploaded the first in an occasional series of short films to our new Vimeo page: click here to see Andrew Hirst reading poems from The Frome Primer (on location in Grimsby) and to view the film accompanying Matthew Clegg’s Lost Between Stations (you can also watch Lost Between Stations via the embedded link below).

Recent posts on the Longbarrow Blog include Chris Jones’ reading of ‘Howl’ (the movie) and Mark Goodwin’s Ordnance Survey lament. Our Soundcloud site features new recordings from Kelvin Corcoran (a preview of his new ‘Sea Table’ sequence) and Andrew Hirst (an excerpt from his 2008 collection ‘Songs to Make & Mend’). Elsewhere on the web, Chris Jones has redesigned and relaunched his website (with several new features) and Rob Hindle concludes his blog‘s excellent mini-series of guest poets from Northern Ireland with a poem by Damian Smyth (the other poets in the series are Moyra Donaldson and Martin Mooney). You can also read work-in-progress from his collaboration with the artist Mark Dunn here.

The faithful come to confess their failings:

bells echo across the water:
wrenches striking a freighter.

(from ‘Across the Water’, Alistair Noon).