Sapo: £14
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October 2022. Hardback. 96pp. Sapo is Spanish for ‘toad’; in parts of Latin America, ‘sly / slippery’, also ‘informer’; in Portuguese, ‘soap’. Origins include Old English sāp (amber, resin, unguent), Latin sēbum (tallow, grease). Cognate with Old French sapient (wise) from Latin sapere. Saber is a Spanish verb, meaning ‘to know / understand’.
The sliding, unsettled or ‘slippery’ meanings and etymologies of a single word – sapo – point to ways in which poems and poetry work. The poems in this collection – written and developed over more than a decade – resound with calls and ‘siren notes’ which, like those of the birds that feature throughout the book, are strange and familiar, settled and contingent. The Covid pandemic (and the earlier plague in Eyam) sunders and coheres communities, just as the bombing of Gernika did, or the inequality in Blake’s Songs; stick houses are less secure and more hospitable than stone ones. Ancient and modern venturers travel into unknown territories in order to know the new only as other versions of the old; poetry resists and embraces form, echo, meaning.
These poems situate themselves intermediately: as inversions, revisions, translations. Hopefully, they are honest; sometimes ambiguous. Ultimately, they are all earthly – all rooted: like the toad, they strive to be vital and foetal. Click here to read a poem from Sapo.
The Grail Roads: £12.99
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2018. Hardback. 144pp. The Grail Roads is the third full-length poetry collection by Rob Hindle. Click here to read poems from the book.
This is a book that I can’t recommend highly enough… The Grail Roads is a beautiful piece of work, a masterpiece. Charlie Connelly on The Grail Roads for The New European, October 2018
The ribbon of land that runs through north-west France and into Flanders is always being turned over. Each year, the ploughs of French and Belgian farmers uncover shrapnel, bullets, barbed wire and artillery shells; an ‘iron harvest’ that takes in the jumbled debris of the Hundred Years’ War, the Napoleonic Wars, and, in particular, the First World War.
The Grail Roads digs deep into the cultural strata of these conflicts, and is haunted by their correspondences and echoes, from Agincourt to Arras. The poems reimagine the ‘quest’ of Galahad, Gawain, and other knights of Arthurian legend, displaced from their familiar mythology and recast as British soldiers on the Western Front. As the war turns attritional, the vision of the Grail darkens; one by one, the men are gathered into a dream of ‘a first and final home’ beyond the wrecked landscapes.
The Grail Roads is a story of loss and reclamation, estrangement and fellowship, in which we read the human cost, and human scale, of every journey and battle.
The Purging of Spence Broughton, a Highwayman
£6 (inc UK P&P)
£7 (inc Europe P&P)
£8.50 (inc Rest of World P&P)
2015. Hand-stamped A5 landscape pamphlet comprising the text of the original pamphlet publication (Longbarrow Press, 2009) and several ‘Illustrations’, one of which (‘Pitchcapping’) is new and exclusive to this edition. Click here for more details of The Purging of Spence Broughton, including recordings, essays and short films.
The Footing: £12
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2013. Hardback. 96pp. The Footing is an anthology of specially commissioned poems on the theme of walking, with substantial contributions from Angelina Ayers, James Caruth, Mark Goodwin, Rob Hindle, Andrew Hirst, Chris Jones and Fay Musselwhite. Rob Hindle’s contribution to the anthology is Flights and Traverses, five long poems and sequences based on five walks in and around Sheffield, each taking as its stimulus the notion of a one-way journey made by people at different points in history. His essay on the ‘ganglands’ of 1920s Sheffield (the setting for his poem ‘Princess Street to the Wicker’) appears here. You can listen to him reading this poem (on location in Sheffield) below:
See Rob Hindle’s website for details of his other publications.
Longbarrow Press 