Longbarrow Press

it steers me north by east
all the way to the end of the land

Longbarrow Press is delighted to announce the publication of To the End of the Land, a new pamphlet and CD by Martin Heslop and Helen Tookey.

The layered histories and complex geography of Nova Scotia – its mountains, mines, lakes and bays – are the settings of this collaborative text and sound work. To the End of the Land investigates this remarkable landscape, and draws out the voices – under the seabed, under the storm – that animate it all.

Developed during a residency at the Elizabeth Bishop House, in Nova Scotia, Canada, To the End of the Land is a sequence of poems – presented as texts, and also embedded in sound compositions – in which past, present and future slide across each other. The book, and accompanying album, is a speculative poetic narrative in which two people (who may or may not be occupying the same reality) move through spaces that are grounded in the real landscapes of Nova Scotia, but are at the same time imagined or dreamlike. All of the sounds used in the audio tracks were recorded by Martin and Helen while they were in Nova Scotia and then altered and remixed to build up compositions that weave around the words. The tracks also feature fragments of Gaelic songs, from the sound archive at Cape Breton University, Canada.

To the End of the Land
28-page pamphlet and 40-minute CD
£12

UK orders (+ £1.80 postage)

Europe orders (+ £5.25 postage)

Rest of World orders (+ £7.75 postage)

You can order the pamphlet and CD by clicking on the relevant PayPal button above. Click here to read an extract from the collaboration.

“Those places are so resonant, they speak of the past, but that inevitably makes you think of the future – the place from which our here-and-now will be the past. It’s as though you’re able to stand outside the present and see yourself as a kind of ghost, no different from the ghosts of the miners or the boat-builders who lived there…”  Martin Heslop and Helen Tookey reflect on the making of To the End of the Land in an interview conducted earlier this month, in which they discuss the origins of the collaboration, their approach to the residency, and their responses to the landscapes of Nova Scotia. Click here to read ‘On the Air’.

“A book is a record of process, or processes: textual, temporal, material. It is made out of the world and it makes its own world and it makes its way through the world. Each of these worlds is imperfect. Nevertheless, the possible book shows me that another world is possible.”  Longbarrow Press was launched at The Red Deer, Sheffield, on 27 April 2006. In ‘Inventory’, editor Brian Lewis opens the archives and reckons with nineteen years of publishing activity. You can read it here.

“After thirty years of dereliction, Thorpe Marsh is like a microcosmic version of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Ponds and thickets have developed across the site; the vast ash dump has completely flooded and become boggy forest and outright marsh. The six two-hundred-yard long settling ponds are transformed to swamp; the car park is a willow forest.”  On 19 April, Steve Ely led a peripatetic workshop at Thorpe Marsh, a former coal-fired power station in the flatlands north of Doncaster. His account of this collaborative ramble appears in a new post on the Longbarrow Blog. Click here to read ‘Thorpe Marsh Apocalypse’. ‘Debris Field’, an accompanying photo-essay by Brian Lewis, appears here.

“Swifts have lived here a lot longer than we have. Once I saw we shared a house with swifts, my attitude toward the place I inhabited, our home, changed for good.” Between May and August, Chris Jones is posting extracts from the ‘swift diaries’ he kept in 2021 and 2024, alongside passages from his 2025 diary. Click here to read the weekly posts on Substack. Chris is one of seven Longbarrow poets who will be taking part in a special event at Novel Bookshop in Crookes, Sheffield, on Wednesday 16 July; the other readers are James Caruth, Matthew Clegg, Angelina D’Roza, Steve Ely, Pete Green and Fay Musselwhite. The event is free, but places are limited: please click here to reserve your place on Eventbrite. A range of Longbarrow hardbacks will be available to purchase on the evening; you can also browse and buy our titles here.

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.