The first of Longbarrow Press’s three events featured in this year’s Sheffield Poetry Festival was The Flight, a programme of short films (curated by Brian Lewis) that explored ideas of memory and movement. The Flight opened with the premiere of Murmuration, a collaboration between Paul Evans and Chris Jones:

Ideas of flight also transport us to the East Yorkshire coast. The chalk headland of Flamborough is the setting of Matthew Clegg‘s atmospheric audio work Cave Time and Sea Changes (recorded in a sea cave last September); the poem-sequence is revisited by online magazine Wild Culture and artist Rebecca French here. Spurn Head (a fragile sand spit largely formed of longshore drift from Flamborough) is the focal point of Eastings, the concluding part of Brian Lewis‘s account of a meridian-crossing new year’s walk through the flatlands of Holderness. Click here to read the essay.

On the Longbarrow Blog, Angelina Ayers considers Sylvia Plath, mixtapes and Turkish Delight in ‘31 Songs‘, while Matthew Clegg reflects on the challenges (and possibilities) of achieving the ‘intimate and strange’ conditions necessary for poetry in ‘The Dream House‘. Excerpts from Ayers and Clegg’s readings for the Sheffield Poetry Festival have been uploaded to SoundCloud; click here to listen to Ayers reading her poem ‘Days’ at Bank Street Arts; click here to listen to Clegg reading ‘A Letter From Tu Fu’ (from his forthcoming collection West North East).

The paths of flood and fire were retraced by Rob Hindle in his Flights and Traverses city walk earlier in June; listen here to Hindle reading and discussing poems that reimagine the 1864 Sheffield Flood and the Sheffield Blitz (recorded on the edge of the ‘old’ city). Finally, the flooding of the River Neva – and the flight of a young man left homeless by its ravages – are the themes of Alexander Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, which appeared in a bold, inventive new translation by Alistair Noon in 2010. Noon’s dynamic reading of the poem (given at the Sheffield Poetry Festival on 2 June 2013) appears below: