Longbarrow Press

On Friday 21 and Saturday 22 March, the longest running artists book fair outside of London returns to Leeds, showcasing the work of 40 artists and small publishers in the central court of Leeds Art Gallery and the adjoining space of Leeds Central Library (both spaces are on the first floor). Longbarrow Press will be among the stallholders at PAGES Artists Book Fair (sharing a table with ​Intergraphia); we’ll have a full range of titles available to browse and buy. The fair is open from 11am to 5pm on Friday and 11am to 4pm on Saturday (with short poetry and prose readings from 1pm on Saturday). Leeds Art Gallery & Leeds Central Library, The Headrow, LS1 3AA. Admission free; all welcome, no booking required. Click here for more details.

“The crunchiness and almost tactile materiality of the language, its naming, the punchy colour of the geographical range, its concreteness, its objective flair, are near to awe-inspiring… This spirited, astonishing, bewildering collection is one of the best long poems I have read, transformatory, guilt-making, tough in surmise and Gothic splendours of the imagination.” Steve Ely‘s symphonic poem Eely is among the books reviewed in the current issue of Blackbox Manifold; click here to read Adam Piette’s detailed appraisal of the collection. Ely discusses the development of the book (and the influence of Geoffrey Hill) with Chris Jones in an episode of The Two-Way Poetry Podcast; you can listen to the conversation here. On Saturday 19 April, Steve Ely leads a three-hour outdoor workshop at the site of the decommissioned and demolished coal-fired power station at Thorpe Marsh, near Doncaster. Click here for further information and to book a place.

“To recognise Japonica is to know it again, as though something laid down in memory surfaces with its flowering, a cluster of pink pressed between pages, and now, years later, recovered.” Our current Featured Poem is ‘Against the Blue of Longing, the Proximity of Green’ from Angelina D’Roza‘s new collection The Blue Hour; you can read it here. Eely, The Blue Hour, and other Longbarrow Press titles are available to browse and buy here.

On Friday 25 and Saturday 26 October, the Small Publishers Fair returns to the Conway Hall in Holborn, London, showcasing the work of over 60 publishers from across the UK and around the world, with an exhibition and a varied programme of readings and talks. Longbarrow Press will be among the stallholders (alongside ​Intergraphia) over the two days of the fair; we’ll have a full range of titles available to browse and buy. The fair is open from 11am to 7pm, with programmes of readings and talks in the afternoons (free, no booking required). Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, Holborn, London, WC1R 4RL. Admission free; all welcome. Click here for more details.

On Tuesday 5 November, Longbarrow poets Steve Ely and Pete Green read with Karl Riordan and Rory Waterman as part of the University of Sheffield’s Centre for Poetry and Poetics series. Lecture Theatre 2, The Diamond, University of Sheffield, 32 Leavygreave Road, S3 7RD. 6pm start. Admission free; all welcome, no booking required. Our current Featured Poem is ‘The Black Mirror’ from Steve Ely’s new collection Eely; you can read it here.

“The light takes its shape from a gap in the blocking stones and prints itself on the floor of the barrow. Time passes. The light holds its shape. It’s an old shape. Old as the oolites. Solid as the sarsens. It has minutes before the sun’s arc, or a passing cloud, peels it away.”  In July 2024, Longbarrow Press editor Brian Lewis travelled to West Kennet Long Barrow, walking four-fifths of the Ridgeway in thirty-five hours, a journey of seventy miles across four English counties. Click here to read his account of the walk.

Finally, The Two-Way Poetry Podcast, a series of interviews in which poet Chris Jones speaks to poets about their own creative inspirations and practice, is a few weeks into its second season. The first of the new podcasts is a discussion with the poet Fay Musselwhite about David Jones’s book-length poem In Parenthesis and her own sequence ‘Memoir of a Working River’ (from her Longbarrow Press collection Contraflow). Listen to it here.

Click here to browse and buy our current publications.