Longbarrow Press

A month-long Longbarrow Press residency starts at the Pop-Up Ruskin Museum (381 South Road, Walkley, Sheffield, S6 3TD) on 2 September. Join us for the salons (1pm-3pm every Wednesday and Thursday this month), in which Matthew Clegg,
Angelina D’Roza, Pete Green, Chris Jones
and Fay Musselwhite will lead discussion of several Ruskin-themed topics with reference to their own and others’ poetry; these are free to attend, and no booking is required. Brian Lewis will also curate a wall display in the Museum during September, drawing on the Longbarrow archive and other relevant texts. The residency will culminate in a collective reading at the Museum at 7pm on Wednesday 30 September, featuring Matthew Clegg, Angelina D’Roza, Pete Green, Chris Jones and Fay Musselwhite. Admission is free; all are welcome to attend.

‘Nature, art and work define the prism through which John Ruskin examined man’s place in the world, and he combined them with mathematical elegance. Art and work require nature as raw material, and through study and further engagement, art and nature will ask of the mind what work takes from the body, while nature and work, for Ruskin, provide the perfect subjects for art.’ Ruskin’s legacy is the starting point for Fay Musselwhite‘s wide-ranging discussion of John Clare, Philip Levine, and other poets and artists in her new essay for the Longbarrow Blog. Click here to read ‘There is No Wealth but Life’.

‘I’m looking for a language that conducts an energy from the world…’ Earlier in August, Matthew Clegg and Brian Lewis walked to Denaby Ings nature reserve, South Yorkshire, to record several poems from the title sequence of Clegg’s recent collection The Navigators. The recordings were made in a rain-soaked viewing hide overlooking the lake; the poems, Clegg’s commentaries, and the unique acoustic of the hide can be heard in a new podcast (click on the orange ‘Play’ button below). Poems in order of appearance: ‘Brigand’, ‘Mexborough, Water-Fronted Properties Released’, ‘ANGLERS REQUIRE PERMITS’, ‘The Tang’, ‘When They Next Make You Redundant’.

One of the poems featured in the podcast, ‘Mexborough, Water-Fronted Properties Released’, is also the subject of a new short film (based on footage of Pastures Road Bridge, Mexborough). Watch the film below:

Photo credits
Mary Musselwhite (1 & 2)
Brian Lewis (3)

Longbarrow Press makes its debut appearance at the Ledbury Poetry Festival this month with a specially devised two-act performance featuring poets Matthew Clegg and Chris Jones and violinist
Emma Bolland. Act One of Personae and Place focuses on Clegg’s sequence ‘Chinese Lanterns’ (in his collection West North East), weaving voices from North Sheffield and the Far East, the ceremonial aspects nuanced by spare musical phrases. The second act features Jones’ sequence ‘Jigs and Reels’ (in his new collection Skin), which contemplates themes of family, ceremony and music itself; these ‘sets’ of poems alternate with folk tunes played by Bolland. Personae and Place is performed at the Burgage Hall, Ledbury, Saturday 11 July (6pm-7pm); click here to book tickets. Our second event in Ledbury is on Sunday 12 July (10am-10.45am), when Longbarrow Press editor Brian Lewis offers an eye-catching history of 10 years of the press in a series of ‘objects’ – matchboxes, maps, postcards – illustrating the values of craft and care. Admission to the talk is free; see our Events page for further details.

Chris Jones’ collection Skin is currently available with Matthew Clegg’s The Navigators; click here to order the hardbacks together for just £24 (inc UK P&P). You’ll also receive the limited edition Skin and The Navigators audio CDs (recorded in churches and sea caves). Clegg’s ongoing canal-themed collaboration with songwriter Ray Hearne, which recently tracked the South Yorkshire Navigation for an afternoon of walking, poetry and song, continues with an appearance at the Ted Hughes Poetry Festival, Mexborough, on Sunday 5 July (two sets, at 7.45pm and 9pm, with performances by other poets). Click here for more information and to book tickets. A short film of Clegg and Hearne’s Mexborough Canal walk (with two poems from The Navigators) appears below:

‘I’m back on solid ground and yet the feeling of being lost remains more acute than ever. No critical framework can dispel it from me; no amount of walking can shake it off.’  Photographer Karl Hurst concludes his reflections on the temporary shelters and permanent markers charted in his photoset Booths with ‘Winter Hare at Alport: A Theory of Disappearance’, the third post under the series title ‘On Liminal Spaces’. Click here to read this essay on the Longbarrow Blog. ‘The Frome Primer is caught between the new space on the edges of our settlements, and the old spaces at their heart; between erasure and exile, drift and displacement.’ Hurst’s ten-year-old collaboration (as Andrew Hirst) with Brian Lewis is revisited in another essay for the Longbarrow Blog, in which the poems and photographs that make up this ‘view of the south from the north’ reappear as fragments and clusters. Click here to read ‘One-sided walls’.

Fay Musselwhite‘s recent walk from Rivelin Glen to the edge of the Peak District brought the industrial, cultural and ecological legacies of the River Rivelin into sharp focus; a further exploration of this terrain will follow in a new post for the Longbarrow Blog later this month. Musselwhite’s ‘Little Matlock’, which reimagines the Sheffield Flood of 1864, was among the poems that featured in the walk. This recording of the poem was made at the river’s edge, in a part of the valley formerly occupied by factories and domestic buildings: