Longbarrow Press

sound mirrors            marooned
on a man-made isle 

The marshes, shingle, and dense woodlands of southern Kent are the settings of Wealden, a new collaborative work by Nancy Gaffield and The Drift. The poems and music were composed in tandem, mapping this extraordinary landscape, from the marshland of the High Weald down to the coast at Dungeness. Wealden deals with the strata – geological, cultural and historical – that have been laid down over the course of one brief millennium, and considers the imminence of the sea reclaiming it all. Longbarrow Press is delighted to announce the publication of Wealden – as a pamphlet and a CD – on 10 November: click here for further details and to order. You can visit the website of The Drift (comprising musicians Darren Pilcher, Rob Pursey and Amelia Fletcher) here, stream and/or pre-order digital downloads here, and read a sample poem from Wealden here.

‘His poetry aspires to the simple, pure alertness of the bird. For Hughes, language itself is a kind of animal. The poem is a sort of creature.’  Matthew Clegg revisits a problematic ‘bulletin from the 70s’ in ‘Second Glance at ‘Deaf School’’, in which his close reading of a ‘flawed’ poem by Ted Hughes is magnified by the distance of several decades. You can read the essay here.  ‘There is a wide empty stretch between the garage and the casino and I let my thoughts slow to almost nothing. The images, too, are slower, smaller, fewer, I sort through them as they come, I set all of them aside but one.’  The first of two new posts by Brian Lewis is a fragmentary memoir, of gathering in and letting go, at the end of a short, unsettled season. Click here to read ‘The Haul’.  ‘This is how I think with the city, this is the Sheffield that I piece together from wrong turns and blind bends, from Wadsley to Woodseats, Walkley to Wincobank. Always, it is slow, always, it is slower than I think.’  ‘Local Distribution’ documents an ill-considered attempt to rescue a library from a closed arts centre, and also considers ‘the spaces of the city’, their cycles of use and disuse, the work made possible in and through them, and their role in the dissemination of books. Click here to read it on the Longbarrow Blog.

Sheaf Poetry Festival returns in digital form in late November, and features two appearances from J.R. Carpenter, both of which will draw on her recent Longbarrow collection This is a Picture of Wind. On Friday 20 November, she leads Writing the Wind, a process-oriented workshop in which participants will be invited to explore approaches to writing about climate change and the ‘invisible force’ of the wind. On Saturday 21 November, she appears as part of Playful Hybrid Forms, an event with poet Abi Palmer, who, like Carpenter, works across genre and with interactive media. Click here for details of the festival programme and to book tickets. We’ve also gathered J.R. Carpenter’s short films for This is a Picture of Wind (created in North Yorkshire during summer 2020) on a single page of this site; you can view them here.

Finally, we’re proud to announce the publication of The European Eel, a new book-length poem by Steve Ely, due from Longbarrow Press later this year. Further details will appear on this site in the near future.

Images:
Rob Pursey, Brian Lewis, J.R. Carpenter

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: