Mid-December through hospital windows
low noon light prickles where frost’s clung
to woods butting the road behind Urology.

Our current Featured Poem is Angelina D’Roza‘s ‘Wintering’, taken from her forthcoming debut collection Envies the Birds (out from Longbarrow Press in spring 2016). Click here to read the poem, and to listen to Angelina D’Roza reading ‘Wintering’ (accompanied by an field recording made at a hospital in Sheffield). The seasonal theme is also taken up by Rob Hindle in his poem ‘Winter in France’ (an extract from a work-in-progress provisionally titled The Grail Roads), which you can find here.

‘Trig Points opens with the poet waking to a morning in early autumn: the taste of smoke, whisky and starlight still on his palate. It plays out 25 haiku variations before returning to a differently nuanced reference to smoke and light: this time in late autumn. It is implied that the next morning will be the first of winter. The whisky has been drunk. The new season will wake up colder and darker: more smoke, less light.’  Matthew Clegg revisits other times and places in ‘Fugue, Shimmer, Pulse and Fuse’, a new essay focusing on the triangulation of ‘inner, domestic and outer worlds’ in his Lake District haiku sequence ‘Trig Points’ (which features in his second Longbarrow collection The Navigators), and the influence of Bach, Steve Reich and Nick Drake on the writing of the sequence. Click here to read the essay on the Longbarrow Blog.

Finally, our recording of Peter Riley’s The Ascent of Kinder Scout (shortlisted for this year’s Michael Marks Awards) is now available to hear through the Longbarrow Press site; click on the orange ‘Play’ button below to listen to the poem in its entirety. The Ascent of Kinder Scout is featured in our current range of special offers, as are recent Longbarrow hardbacks by Matthew Clegg, Mark Goodwin and Chris Jones; click here for further details and to order titles.

Photos by Karl Hurst