There is nothing of sorrow here
except the dead end, its terraced shadow.

Our current Featured Poem is ‘Kipling Road’ by Rob Hindle, the first poem in his sequence ‘Hillsborough to Middlewood, February 1931’ (in the Longbarrow Press anthology The Footing). Click here to read the poem, and to listen to Rob Hindle
reading ‘Kipling Road’ on location in Sheffield. ‘Hillsborough to Middlewood, February 1931’ retraces the short journey between Hindle’s great grandparents’ house and the South Yorkshire Asylum, where their son Harold died; this ‘one-way journey’ is also the subject of a new essay by Brian Lewis, in which the terrain mapped by the sequence is re-walked and reconsidered. Click here to read ‘Dead Ends’ on the Longbarrow Blog.

The Longbarrow archive of our Featured Poems is now accessible via a new menu, with over 50 poems indexed on separate pages (many with audio recordings and short films). Click here to browse the index. We’ve also updated our recent History; our year-in-review for 2015 can be found here, illustrated with some previously unseen photos and soundtracked by a selection of podcasts.

‘And this is where the map runs out, cutting the airport and regatta in half, two miles east of the meridian.’ Our second new post on the Longbarrow Blog revisits the dossier on London’s Docklands compiled by the poet Ken Smith 30 years ago, a series of cryptic despatches from the east end’s fractured and raided ‘enterprise zone’. Click here to read ‘The House of Numbers’ by Brian Lewis.

Finally, Pete Green and Fay Musselwhite read a selection of ecologically-themed poems on Tuesday 16 February as part of The University of Sheffield’s interdisciplinary Festival of 10bn. The evening-long ‘Cafe Conversations’ event also takes in short films, talks and discussions, and a selection of Longbarrow Press titles will be available to browse and buy from our stall. Coffee Revolution, University of Sheffield Student’s Union, Western Bank, Sheffield S10 2TG, Tuesday 16 February, 7pm start (poetry from 8.30pm). Admission free; all welcome.