Longbarrow Press

Ahead of the publication of Matthew Clegg‘s second full-length collection The Navigators (due from Longbarrow Press in May 2015), we revisit a selection of his earlier titles, including the pamphlets Officer, Lost Between Stations and the acclaimed ‘matchbox’ edition of his 2008 sequence Edgelands (of which only a handful of copies remain available). Order any Matthew Clegg title from Longbarrow Press in March 2015 (including his debut collection West North East) and we’ll include a limited edition, handmade Edgelands postcard – and an additional piece of Longbarrow Press ephemera. Click here to view (and order) the full range of Matthew Clegg publications.

‘My interest in the vernacular is imaginative. I’m concerned with the life lived and the language that expresses that life…’ Part of the cultural and geographical terrain of The Navigators is previewed in ‘Radged and Nithered: A Vernacular Sensibility’, a new post for the Longbarrow Blog in which Matthew Clegg explores the idea of a language ‘lived’ or ‘lived in’ – specifically, the language used by the navvies and boatmen that built and plied the South Yorkshire waterways. Click here to read the essay (and to listen to Clegg reading his poem ‘Attercliffe’ on a South Yorkshire canal towpath).

Our second new post on the Longbarrow Blog is ‘Circumspect & Circumflex’, which finds Mark Goodwin
reflecting on the ‘cartography’ of his Longbarrow Press collection Steps, and addressing the somewhat different art of ‘navigation’ practiced by ‘map-maker-readers’. ‘That’s what a map’s for: to make us believe that the infinitely detailed, multi-directional & complicatedly angled terrain we find our selves in can be organised…’ You can read the essay here. Steps also provides us with our current Featured Poem, ‘Lit Lichen, Tŷ Uchaf’, a movement through and towards ‘keyhole sized portions / of a landscape’. The poem appears here; for further details of Steps, please click here. Mark Goodwin will present an evening of readings from Steps on Thursday 23 April at Leicester’s Exchange Bar (50 Rutland St, LE1 1RD); further details will be posted here soon.

Photo credits:
Emma Bolland
Nikki Clayton

Chalk cliffs are wax-white and gull-white…

Matthew Clegg‘s poem ‘Chalk’, a recasting of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse in sonnet form, is one of five poems currently featured in The Journal of Wild Culture‘s maritime selection Gazing In And Out To Sea. Click here to read the poems. ‘Chalk’, which looks out at, from and beyond the chalk stacks of Flamborough, appears in Clegg’s forthcoming collection The Navigators (due from Longbarrow Press in May 2015). Clegg’s debut collection West North East is still available from Longbarrow Press, as is his limited edition pamphlet Officer; click here to read an extract from the pamphlet (and to order copies).

‘Night itself becomes a place, a temporary theatre…’ The life and works of Sheffield sculptor George Fullard are remembered in ‘Haunts’, a short essay in which Brian Lewis traces the ‘internal displacement’ of three bronze statues in Andrew Hirst‘s sequence ‘Three Night Walks’ (featured in the Longbarrow Press anthology The Footing). You can read the essay here. ‘I lost someone recently. He wasn’t a love or a relative, or even a friend. He wasn’t mine to lose at all…’ In another new essay, Angelina Ayers
pursues and develops a different reading of displacement by way of DH Lawrence, Kraftwerk and The Eagles. Click here to read ‘Hotel California’ on the Longbarrow Blog. Our third essay of 2015 is the first in a three-part series by Karl Hurst focusing on the ‘liminal spaces’ opened up by his photographic practice. ‘Reflections on Impracticality’ examines ideas of home, identity, and, in particular, the ‘temporary shelters’ found in certain Northern English landscapes (which lend their name to his current photo-series ‘Booths’). You can read the essay here.

Mark Goodwin and Brian Lewis reflect on the editing and shaping of Goodwin’s recent collection Steps in a candid and wide-ranging discussion with Elaine Aldred (on her Strange Alliances blog); click here to read ‘Steps of Creation’. Mark also recounts the development of his work as a sound artist in a further interview with Elaine (with contributions from producer Steve Gibbs); click here to read the interview.

Photo credits:
Karl Hurst (from the series ‘Booths’)
Brian Lewis