A month-long Longbarrow Press residency starts at the Pop-Up Ruskin Museum (381 South Road, Walkley, Sheffield, S6 3TD) on 2 September. Join us for the salons (1pm-3pm every Wednesday and Thursday this month), in which Matthew Clegg,
Angelina D’Roza, Pete Green, Chris Jones
and Fay Musselwhite will lead discussion of several Ruskin-themed topics with reference to their own and others’ poetry; these are free to attend, and no booking is required. Brian Lewis will also curate a wall display in the Museum during September, drawing on the Longbarrow archive and other relevant texts. The residency will culminate in a collective reading at the Museum at 7pm on Wednesday 30 September, featuring Matthew Clegg, Angelina D’Roza, Pete Green, Chris Jones and Fay Musselwhite. Admission is free; all are welcome to attend.

‘Nature, art and work define the prism through which John Ruskin examined man’s place in the world, and he combined them with mathematical elegance. Art and work require nature as raw material, and through study and further engagement, art and nature will ask of the mind what work takes from the body, while nature and work, for Ruskin, provide the perfect subjects for art.’ Ruskin’s legacy is the starting point for Fay Musselwhite‘s wide-ranging discussion of John Clare, Philip Levine, and other poets and artists in her new essay for the Longbarrow Blog. Click here to read ‘There is No Wealth but Life’.

‘I’m looking for a language that conducts an energy from the world…’ Earlier in August, Matthew Clegg and Brian Lewis walked to Denaby Ings nature reserve, South Yorkshire, to record several poems from the title sequence of Clegg’s recent collection The Navigators. The recordings were made in a rain-soaked viewing hide overlooking the lake; the poems, Clegg’s commentaries, and the unique acoustic of the hide can be heard in a new podcast (click on the orange ‘Play’ button below). Poems in order of appearance: ‘Brigand’, ‘Mexborough, Water-Fronted Properties Released’, ‘ANGLERS REQUIRE PERMITS’, ‘The Tang’, ‘When They Next Make You Redundant’.

One of the poems featured in the podcast, ‘Mexborough, Water-Fronted Properties Released’, is also the subject of a new short film (based on footage of Pastures Road Bridge, Mexborough). Watch the film below:

Photo credits
Mary Musselwhite (1 & 2)
Brian Lewis (3)