As the season shifts, Longbarrow Press enters a new phase of talks, readings and performances in Sheffield and London (full details on our Events page). The first of our Sheffield events takes place at the Cupola Gallery on Wednesday 21 October at 7pm, and features James Caruth, Angelina D’Roza, Mark Goodwin and Peter Riley reading poems that respond to the Peak District landscapes of the Seven Wonders, an ongoing collaborative project initiated in 2010 by the artist Paul Evans. The reading marks the close of ‘Between Water and Stone: The Wonders of The Peak’, Evans’ current exhibition at Cupola, in which new paintings and drawings appear alongside poems by Chris Jones, Helen Mort, Fay Musselwhite and the aforementioned poets. On Friday 23 October (7.30pm), Rob Hindle and Ray Hearne revisit Hindle’s dramatic sequence The Purging of Spence Broughton, a Highwayman in a special performance at Walkley Community Centre (7A Fir Street, S6 3TG) as part of this year’s Off the Shelf festival. Ahead of the event, we’ve uploaded a new short film based on footage of Hindle and Hearne’s performance of Spence Broughton at Boston Castle, Rotherham, in May 2015. Watch the film below:
We head southward to the Peckham Pelican on Saturday 17 October (12pm – 5pm, free) for the Literary Kitchen All Tomorrow’s Publishers fair (co-curated by The Learned Pig), showcasing the work of 14 journals and independent publishing houses from around the UK. The Longbarrow Press stall (staffed by editor and publisher Brian Lewis) will have a full range of titles and a number of special offers; you’re welcome to call in to browse and chat. Our second London engagement is at The Poetry Library on Wednesday 4 November (8pm – 9pm), with a collaborative reading by Matthew Clegg, Angelina D’Roza, Chris Jones and Fay Musselwhite, introduced and soundtracked by Brian Lewis. The event (part of the Poetry Library’s Special Edition series) is free, but advance booking is essential: click here for more details. Later in the same week, we move to Bloomsbury’s Conway Hall for the two-day Small Publishers Fair (Friday 6 – Saturday 7 November, 11am – 7pm, free), sharing a table with Gordian Projects, and sharing the hall with over 60 publishers from the UK and beyond. An exhibition and programme of readings and talks will also feature as part of the fair.
‘I wonder why the impression of an absent animal should move me, so that I’ve been carrying the look of it, more than the words, with me the last few years – but that absence made present through the toppled grass, the shul, makes the other absence tangible. I feel the I missing you. I feel the weight of it in my chest. That it is painful.’ Angelina D’Roza‘s reflections on the ‘silent weight’ of loss and departure, interspersed with excerpts from her prose poem ‘Marginalia’, appear as a new post on the Longbarrow Blog; click here to read ‘Lip-syncing to Roy Orbison’. ‘The rain has formed a second skin around the hide, audibly and visibly thick, a temporary curtain for the unwalled side of the structure, a blind at our backs.’ Earlier this summer, Matthew Clegg and Brian Lewis recorded some poems from Clegg’s collection The Navigators in a rain-soaked shelter at Denaby Ings nature reserve. Lewis’s account of the experience, ‘The Hide’, is our second new post on the Longbarrow Blog: click here to read the essay.
Finally, we’ve uploaded an audio podcast of the first movement of ‘The Exchange’, a three-part collective performance by Matthew Clegg, Angelina D’Roza, Pete Green, Chris Jones and Fay Musselwhite at the Pop-Up Ruskin Museum, Sheffield, 30 September 2015. Listen to the podcast below. Poems: ‘How Rivers Begin’ (Fay Musselwhite), ‘Because I Was Nobody’ (Matthew Clegg), ‘Shifts’ (Angelina D’Roza), ‘To a Person Employed…’ (Pete Green), ‘Work’ (Chris Jones), ‘Days’ (Angelina D’Roza), ‘Lost Between Stations: 1’ (Matthew Clegg), ‘Grimsby’ (Pete Green), ‘Goat Boy staggers on’ (Fay Musselwhite), ‘Home’ (Chris Jones).
