We’ve created a limited offer on our handsome litho-printed hardbacks (ends midnight 11 April 2023): choose any 3 hardbacks for £30. Payments are handled securely via PayPal (debit cards accepted via the ‘Check Out as a Guest’ option – no PayPal account required). You can also pay by bank transfer (email longbarrowpress@gmail.com for bank transfer details). All orders are carefully parcelled in robust packaging.
The 15 hardbacks are: Sapo by Rob Hindle, The European Eel by Steve Ely, This is a Picture of Wind by J.R. Carpenter, Truth, Justice, and the Companionship of Owls by Peter Riley, Meridian by Nancy Gaffield, Rock as Gloss by Mark Goodwin, Cazique by Matthew Clegg, The Grail Roads by Rob Hindle, Contraflow by Fay Musselwhite, Envies the Birds by Angelina D’Roza, Skin by Chris Jones, The Navigators by Matthew Clegg, Steps by Mark Goodwin, West North East by Matthew Clegg and The Footing anthology (scroll down for further details of each book; the hardbacks can also be ordered separately via these links, priced £12–£14). To order, click on the relevant PayPal button below, and proceed to payment. After payment, please email Brian Lewis at longbarrowpress@gmail.com to confirm the titles you’ve ordered (e.g. Meridian, The Grail Roads and Contraflow). You can also let us know if you would like your order to be gift-wrapped and/or sent to a different address (at no extra cost), or if you have any further queries. Orders are usually despatched within 24 hours.
3 Longbarrow hardbacks for £30
UK orders (+£4.00 postage)
Europe orders (+£12.00 postage)
Rest of World orders (+£21.00 postage)
Sapo by Rob Hindle (2022)
96-page hardback collection. 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. Click here to read a poem from Sapo.
The European Eel by Steve Ely (2021)
80-page hardback (illustrated throughout with artwork by P.R. Ruby). The European Eel is a long poem that imagines the life cycle, ecological contexts and enigma of the charismatic and critically endangered fish of the poem’s title. Based on Ely’s in-depth engagement with the scientific literature, discussions with leading eel researchers and conservationists, and hands-on experience with the eel in river systems across the country and abroad, The European Eel is unique not only in its sustained birth-to-death focus on the eel, but in the vivid way the eel’s riverine and marine habitats are evoked and articulated—and in its portrayal of the daunting array of anthropogenic threats that are currently threatening this once common species with extinction. Click here to read an extract from the book. Click here to read ‘Body of Dark’, a reflective essay on the development of The European Eel.
This is a Picture of Wind by J.R. Carpenter (2020)
128-page hardback collection. This is a Picture of Wind expands upon a series of short texts written in response to the winter storms which battered south west England in early 2014, resulting in catastrophic flooding in Somerset and the destruction of the seawall and rail line at Dawlish in Devon. Following the news in the months after these storms, writer and artist J.R. Carpenter was struck by the paradox presented by attempts to evoke through the materiality of language a force such as wind which we can only perceive indirectly through its affect. The poems that ensued are gathered in this book, accompanied by an introduction by Johanna Drucker, and a poetic afterword by Vahni Capildeo. This is a Picture of Wind was selected as one of The Guardian’s Best poetry books of 2020.
Truth, Justice, and the Companionship of Owls
by Peter Riley (2019)
96-page hardback collection. The Upper Calder Valley is a landscape of high moors, small farms and wooded hillsides. It is the setting for many of the poems in Truth, Justice, and the Companionship of Owls, in which the conditions of movement (of buses, trains, water and wind) are set against the conditions of stillness (the ‘abandoned chapels’ and ‘demolished mills’ that persist at the edges of settlements). While there is disquiet in these ‘dark distances’, haunted by legacies and prospects of ‘human harm’, there is also trust, belief, connection, the ‘night music’ of the moorland, the ideas of truth and justice, ‘the stone paths strung over the hills’. For more details, click here.
Meridian by Nancy Gaffield (2019)
112-page hardback collection. Between 2015 and 2017, Nancy Gaffield walked the 270-mile Greenwich Meridian Trail from Peacehaven to Sand le Mere, in order to investigate the way that landscapes are disturbed and reordered by history and memory. In Meridian, the line of longitude is the ‘zero point’ through which these forces speak: the intersecting planes of poetry and song, politics and the polis, land and sea, presence and absence, shadow and light. For more details, click here.
Rock as Gloss by Mark Goodwin (2019)
184-page hardback collection. Rock as Gloss is Mark Goodwin‘s sixth full-length book of poems. Divided into four ‘compasses’, its 184 pages offer a variety of approaches to ‘the rock in hand’ (whether gritstone or slate), or the fell under foot (whether on or off the map), and also enact a dialogue with the culture and literature of climbing and fell-walking, speaking to (and through) Menlove Edwards, Ted Hughes, Coleridge and others. The poems and fictions of Rock as Gloss navigate imaginary and actual journeys through textures of movement and stillness, setting down lines ‘touched by gravity’. For more details, click here.
Cazique by Matthew Clegg (2018)
96-page hardback collection. Cazique is a book in three movements. ‘Officer’ / ‘Zipped File’ details the breakdown in communication between employee and employer. ‘Holodets’ tackles what is lost in translation during a love affair between an English poet and a Russian immigrant. The title sequence offers the last confessions of a washed-up confidence trickster: a man inspired by the 19th century swindler Gregor MacGregor – the self-titled Cazique of Poyais. The poems of Cazique continue the author’s engagement with personae and place – and the ever-unstable relationship between the two. For more details, click here.
The Grail Roads by Rob Hindle (2018)
144-page hardback collection. 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, The New European, October 2018.
The Grail Roads reimagines 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. For more details, click here.
Contraflow by Fay Musselwhite (2016)
112-page hardback collection. Rising from peat moorland north-west of Sheffield, the fast-flowing river Rivelin, and the valley it etched out, is the setting for many of Musselwhite’s poems. Contraflow harnesses these energies to carve its own rugged course, with its bottlenecks, bends and counter-currents: tales that slant, swell and spill. For more details, click here.
Envies the Birds by Angelina D’Roza (2016)
80-page hardback collection. In Tibetan, shul is the impression left after whatever made it has gone. Envies the Birds is the tarmac blueprint where a tower block once stood, “the channel worn through rock where a river runs in flood, the indentation in the grass where an animal slept last night”. For more details, click here.
Skin by Chris Jones (2015)
96-page hardback collection. Skin reflects on the ties that bind us, taking in the complex layering of human relationships and the cells and tissues of the body itself. A book of bonds, reaching back, reaching out, Chris Jones’s second collection is a sensory exploration of the world we inhabit and try to make sense of. For more details, click here.
The Navigators by Matthew Clegg (2015)
128-page hardback collection. The Navigators explores the portals that connect time and place, and meditates on the element of water, as it moves through both. The book opens with rain falling in the Lake District, flowing to the South Yorkshire waterways, before arriving at the North Sea. The Navigators is an affirmation of the reflection and regeneration that we find where waters meet and mingle. For more details, click here.
Steps by Mark Goodwin (2014)
144-page hardback collection. Mark Goodwin’s poetry isn’t merely about landscape… it manifests landscape, in its openness to all the encounters that engagement with landscape makes possible. – Norman Jope. Perception sharp as feeling itself, invention endlessly resolving into apt idiosyncrasies of form, the continuing development of Mark Goodwin is maybe the most exciting happening in British poetry today. – Jim Perrin. For more details, click here.
The Footing by Angelina Ayers, James Caruth, Mark Goodwin, Rob Hindle, Andrew Hirst, Chris Jones and Fay Musselwhite (2013)
96-page hardback anthology of walking-themed poems. It is the best anthology of new work that I’ve read in years; anyone with an interest in contemporary British poetry should read it. – Billy Mills. What a book! Walking-writing as a collective act, as it should be. – Robert Macfarlane. For more details, click here.
West North East by Matthew Clegg (2013)
96-page hardback collection. Matthew Clegg’s first full-length collection is a book in three parts, each comprising a different approach to ideas of crisis, journey and imaginative crossing. Includes ‘The Walking Cure’ and the sequences ‘Edgelands’ and ‘Chinese Lanterns’. A great book. – Helen Mort. For more details, click here.
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