Not the swoop
or the spread of the feathers
but the wait on the treetop,
the watcher’s presence.

Alistair Noon launches his new Longbarrow Press pamphlet, QUAD, at The Fat Cat, Alma Street, Sheffield S3 8SA on Monday 8 May (7.30pm start). Alistair will also be joined by Longbarrow poet Chris Jones (who, like Alistair, recently contributed to the Rose of Temperaments project: the two poets will present a ‘re-colouring’ of each other’s sonnets as part of the reading). The event is free; all are welcome.

Later this month, the South Yorkshire Poetry Festival returns, with a varied programme of readings, performances, open mics and poetry walks between 16-28 May. Among the featured events is ‘Vanishing Point’, a Sheffield city walk led by poets Angelina D’Roza and Pete Green (Sunday 28 May, 11am start); click here for more information (and to reserve places) on the walk. The full festival programme can be accessed here.

The wind with nothing. / The stone’s directions. On The Journal of Wild Culture‘s site, a ‘long short story’ by Mark Goodwin explores the shifting, deceptive textures of crag, ridge and gully, its protagonist improvising a path between risk and transcendence, veil and vision, movement and paralysis, against the backdrop of an unnamed peak. Click here to read ‘The Ewe Stone’ (accompanied by an interview with Goodwin and a selection of images drawn from The Seven Wonders by Paul Evans).

A new Longbarrow Press podcast, drawing on poems in the first section of Matthew Clegg‘s recent collection The Navigators, offers a ‘fireside’ ambience, in which Clegg reflects on intimacy, hospitality and romantic love, and the landscapes, creatures and people of Grasmere. Listen to ‘Trig Points: The Hearth’: