Longbarrow Press

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.

Lower the tip of your split-cane rod:
these peatland drains are black with little eels.

Longbarrow Press is delighted to announce the publication of Eely, a new collection by Steve Ely.

Eely is a symphony in four movements. The first movement, Eel (previously published in a slightly different version by Longbarrow Press as The European Eel), focuses on the lifecycle, ecology, epic migration, conservation status and enigma of the European eel. The second movement, ˈiːlai/, explores two main themes: the author’s autobiographical encounter with the eel, and the conflict that was so often associated with that encounter. The third movement, eely, develops the themes of the second movement in a guerrilla-pastoral, folk-horror fantasy of the author as a were-eel—if Eel is an adagio and ˈiːlai/ a sonata, then eely is a capriccio. The fourth movement, Eelysium, concludes the piece and broadens the vision with a focus on the Eastern fenlands of England. The English fenlands were once a stronghold of the European eel, as they were for many other species. The poem imagines the origin of the fens in the eustasy of the early Holocene, their development from the Mesolithic to the Early Modern period, their ecological and economic superabundance, the social and ecological catastrophe of their destruction, and a vision of their restoration.

Eely
£14.99 £14 (launch price)

UK orders (+ £2.50 postage)

Europe orders (+ £6.45 postage)

Rest of World orders (+ £11.25 postage)

A beautifully produced 184-page hardback, Eely is available now from Longbarrow Press. You can order the book securely by clicking on the relevant PayPal link above (major debit cards accepted – no PayPal account required).

Our current Featured Poem is ‘Winwædfeld’ from Eely; you can read it here. Eely is launched at Small Seeds, Castlegate, Huddersfield, HD1 2UD on Thursday 25 April as part of the 2024 Huddersfield Literature Festival (6pm start). Click here for further details and tickets (the event is free, but booking is recommended).

“The drainage of the fens is generally regarded as a triumphant episode in the national historiography, in which vast tracts of uninhabited and pestilent swamp were converted into the most productive farmland in Britain, contributing significantly to feeding the growing population of the nation as it rose to become a mighty imperial power. The truth of the matter is very different.” In a new post for the Longbarrow Blog, Steve Ely discusses the themes that inform his new collection – biodiversity, fenland, power, conflict, eels, and more – and introduces four poems from the book. Click here to read ‘Eelysium’.

All this time I’ve been waiting for dawn
when I already had what I needed.

‘Correspondences: The Lark Ascending’, from Angelina D’Roza‘s new collection The Blue Hour, is a recent Featured Poem; you can read it here. A further poem in the ‘Correspondences’ series – ‘The Credence of Birds’ – is the focus of a conversation between Angelina D’Roza and Chris Jones, recorded for series one of The Two-Way Poetry Podcast, in which the two poets discuss influence, process, Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy and the gritstone ‘theatre’ of the Peak District. You can listen to the conversation here (and read the text of D’Roza’s poem). All nine episodes of series one of The Two-Way Poetry Podcast (with contributions from Longbarrow poets James Caruth, Matthew Clegg, Pete Green and Rob Hindle, among others) are gathered here.