The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust

On Sunday 27 October, Matthew Clegg, Rob Hindle and Fay Musselwhite present Street Haunting: an evening of narrative poetry at The Fat Cat, Alma Street, Sheffield S3 8SA. This special event features a selection of narrative poems with an urban slant: journeys and encounters from the outskirts to the centre. The evening will also feature short films by Brian Lewis and a discussion with the poets. Rob Hindle’s recent blog post, ‘The long poem’s orbit and the audience’, reflects on the shaping of the event. 7.30pm start (you are welcome to join us upstairs from 7pm); admission is £3 on the door.

On the Longbarrow Blog, Brian Lewis haunts (and is haunted by) the landscapes of Matthew Clegg‘s West North East in ‘The Cut’, an extended meditation on blackberries, power failure and the making of Longbarrow Press’s first full-length collection. You can read it here. Earlier this summer, Clegg and Lewis travelled to the eastern edge of the book – Flamborough Head – to record the second in a series of three podcasts focusing on poems from West North East. Ideas of separateness and disappearance frame Clegg’s compelling readings of ‘Out Far and In Deep’ and ‘The Power-line’, as do sounds from the bird colonies that occupy the border between land and sea. Listen to the podcast below:

Finally, our long-awaited anthology The Footing, featuring walking-themed poems by Angelina Ayers, James Caruth, Mark Goodwin, Rob Hindle, Andrew Hirst, Chris Jones and Fay Musselwhite, is published by Longbarrow Press on 30 October. Click here to read Chris Jones‘ essay on the making of his Reformation sequence ‘Death and the Gallant’. Ordering information for the book and details of a special launch event will be posted here and on The Footing microsite in the very near future.