Sirs, please don’t brick up
The useless hole in the wall
Or knock down the frame:
Let it stand as a jetty
To land or leap into dream.

Longbarrow Press has created a new website to showcase poems by participants in the recent Moving with Thought workshop and walk. The poems are rich and rewarding in their freshness, invention and variety; collectively, they offer a sustained meditation on the Kelham Island, Neepsend and Parkwood districts of Sheffield. Click here to read poems by John Barron, Emma Bolland, Matthew Clegg, Mark Doyle, Chris Jones, Oliver Mantell, Mary Marken, Julie Mellor, Gareth Parry, Karl Riordan, Steve Sawyer and Zoe Walkington; you can also listen to many of the poets reading their work on the Moving with Thought SoundCloud site (the recording programme will continue through August, and further recordings will be uploaded to the site).

Phase Two of The Seven Wonders continues with a double vision of Hen Cloud (part of a gritstone escarpment above the Leek and Tittesworth Reservoir): a new poem by Mark Goodwin (‘Hen Prayer’) is paired with a new painting by Paul Evans. You can view the painting and the poem here. New recordings of ‘Hen Prayer’ (on location in the Peak District) and Fay Musselwhite‘s poem for Kinder Downfall (‘Phlegmatic’) are also available to hear on The Seven Wonders SoundCloud site. Angelina Ayers‘ essay ‘Graffiti’ (on Evans and Musselwhite’s collaboration and Sheffield’s Park Hill) appears here; click here to listen to Ayers and Evans discussing the Seven Wonders project.

Brian Lewis has made a new film to accompany the second poem in Matthew Clegg’s Lost Between Stations. Click here for the full-screen film on Vimeo, or watch it via the embedded link below:

Ahead of a new performance (and the republication) of his 2009 sequence The Purging of Spence Broughton, a Highwayman this October, Rob Hindle considers the legacy of its eponymous antihero in this fascinating post. The threads of Spence Broughton’s life and afterlife are also picked up by Simon Newton, whose excellent audio documentary on Broughton (featuring contributions from Hindle and others) can be found here. You can hear Rob Hindle reading ‘Sea Battle off Cape Trafalgar’ (from XII Fragments, a collection of poems included with The Purging of Spence Broughton) in Sheffield’s Hill Top Chapel (built in 1629, and the site of the 2009 performance of Hindle’s work) here.

Andrew Hirst (aka Karl Hurst), whose current photographic series Sketches for Summer lends this post its title (and its header image), is profiled in the new edition of the online visual arts journal The 22 Magazine. Click here to view their wide-ranging selection of 33 images from Sketches for Summer. On the Longbarrow Blog, Chris Jones ruminates on poetry and place names (and his decision to avoid ‘naming names’ in his forthcoming sequence Death and the Gallant), while Luke Bennett offers a new slant on Mark Goodwin‘s practice (as poet and climber) in his ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors’. Finally, we’ve uploaded a further extract from last year’s memorable debut performance by Tria Kalistos (Kelvin Corcoran, Maria Pavlidou, Howard Wright); click here to listen to their unique blend of lyric poetry and traditional Greek music in a setting of Corcoran’s ‘Helen Mania’.