Invisible Lines is the third – and last – in our series of place-themed digital supplements. In this selection of poems and essays, Nancy Gaffield,
Mark Goodwin, Rob Hindle and Chris Jones consider the relationship between movement and mapping, and the extent to which our itineraries (whether grounded or imaginative) are informed by cartographical detail and subjective experience. The lines made by walking point forward (as in the northward trajectory of Gaffield’s Meridian), sideways (the slow-stepping rail-balancing practised by Goodwin), and back (the histories uncovered by Hindle and Jones); and, sometimes, in all directions at once. You can read and download Invisible Lines here. We’ve also gathered our earlier supplements (including Working Landscapes and Soft Borders) on a single page of this site; you can read and download them here.

Following the recent publication of This is a Picture of Wind, J.R. Carpenter discusses the development of the project in a wide-ranging interview for Justin Hopper’s Uncanny Landscapes podcast series. The conversation also touches on weather, climate change and imperialism; mapping invisible systems, and Vahni Capildeo’s poetic response to This is a Picture of Wind. You can listen to / download it here. In a short essay for the Hyperconnectivity series, Timothy Wilcox contrasts the screen-based version of This is a Picture of Wind – its generative texts echoing the data stream of a live weather update – with the ‘delayered’ and linear arrangements of the print iteration. Click here to read ‘Digital Nature’. The second in an occasional series of short films by J.R. Carpenter, drawing on This is a Picture of Wind, can be viewed below:

‘It hurt when / they first parcelled all the open ground and owned / it. And it hurts still, to find all the fields / of your heart tightened into a plastic packet.’  In April 2020, Louis & Mark Goodwin visited the site of their former family home in Bittesby, Leicestershire, its ‘ways’ now buried, the cottage and farm buildings scheduled for demolition. ‘The Flattening & Covering Wave, an April this 2020’ records and reflects on these processes of displacement, enclosure, and ‘flattening’; you can read it here.  ‘… there is no escaping, by climbing nor walking, not by going across nor up … there is something dark laid down here … below us all …’ Leicestershire is also the setting for a second post on the Longbarrow Blog, in which Mark Goodwin takes imaginative flight to Bradgate Park, and conjures a range of ‘tiny mountains’ from this ‘bowl of embers’. Click here to read ‘Reach, a Bradgate Oddity’.

Finally, we’ve uploaded a recording of Rob Hindle introducing and reading poems from his recent Longbarrow collection The Grail Roads (recorded at the Centre for Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, University of Sheffield, 1 May 2019). You can listen to it below: