Longbarrow Press

Longbarrow Press is delighted to announce the publication of Mark Goodwin‘s long-awaited collection, Steps. A 144-page journey through the landscapes of England, Ethiopia, Scotland, Spain and Wales, Steps is also a sustained engagement with the journey’s pauses, in which the landscapes invite us to listen; the gaps that compel our attention, and from which these poems are constructed.

A beautifully produced hardback, Steps is available now at the special price of £12 (inc UK P&P) through the Longbarrow Press website and Steps microsite (normally £12.99). A limited edition CD, steps / sounds, featuring 10 ‘sound-enhanced’ recordings of poems from the book, is also included free with all online orders (while stocks last). You can order the book by clicking on the PayPal link below (major debit cards accepted – no PayPal account required):

Steps: £12 (inc UK P&P)

Steps: £16 (inc Europe P&P)

Steps: £18 (inc Rest of World P&P)

Steps will be launched at The Fat Cat, 23 Alma Street, Sheffield, S3 8SA at 7.30pm on Sunday 7 December, as part of a special Longbarrow Press end-of-year event with readings from Angelina Ayers, Mark Goodwin and Fay Musselwhite. A full range of Longbarrow Press titles will also be on sale at a pre-Christmas discount. Admission is free; all are welcome.

‘I imagined the surface of the road bending under his weight…’ ‘Wrong & Right’, Mark Goodwin‘s account of ‘two difficult moments’ that resist poetic remaking, and which compel a plain retelling, is our current post on the Longbarrow Blog; click here to read the essay. A field-recording expedition to a derelict rubber mill in Derbyshire provides Goodwin with the impetus for another short piece for the Affective Digital Histories blog; click here to read ‘Voyage into the Interior of Volcrepe’.

Finally, our serialisation of Matthew Clegg‘s narrative epic Lost Between Stations concludes this month; click here to read (and listen to) the seventh and last poem in the sequence.

Our series of essays and podcasts reflecting on the fragments of Catholic wall art encountered in a one-day tour of Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire churches concludes with two blog posts by Emma Bolland and Chris Jones. In ‘The Last Judgement‘, Bolland draws out the shape of the devil from the walls of St Andrew’s, Pickworth, and marvels at the persistence of pigment, centuries after the Reformation’s 100-year campaign to purge the churches of colour. The third and final post in the series, Jones’ ‘The Shepherds of Corby Glen‘, is a reimagining of the community that rural churchgoers might have known in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, reflected back to them through paintings of bucolic scenes, whitewashed, rediscovered, and now ‘floating up through the bricks and stone’. Both essays are accompanied by podcasts of Bolland and Jones discussing the wall art (recorded in the respective churches), and are illustrated with Bolland’s photographs.

On the West North East microsite, we’re serialising Matthew Clegg‘s narrative sequence Lost Between Stations (published by Longbarrow Press in 2011). A ‘poem in seven fragments’, it explores the shifting tensions of predicament and place in seven Leeds settings during the 1990s. Each of these ‘fragments’ will be posted on the West North East site (along with their accompanying recordings and films) during October and November. Click here to read the current Lost Between Stations extract.

Our current Featured Poem is Mark Goodwin‘s ‘slate-stepped’ ‘Step From I’, taken from his forthcoming collection Steps (out from Longbarrow Press at the end of November). Click here to read the poem, and to listen to Goodwin’s location recording of ‘Step From I’; click here to visit the new Steps microsite. Osip Mandelstam’s ‘The Ode on Slate’ is offered up in a new translation and short essay by Alistair Noon for the Glasgow Review of Books; the translation and the essay appear here.

Finally, we’ve updated our History page with a selection of films, essays, poems, and photos from the last 10 months; click here to review the Longbarrow year to date.