Longbarrow Press

Fay Musselwhite’s poems in the Longbarrow Press anthology The Footing are shaped by a personal connection with the River Rivelin in Sheffield.  On Saturday 1 March (1pm start) she will lead Contra Flow, a unique walk through this tree-lined valley, taking us from the suburb of Crosspool to the edge of the Peak District via the sites of her poems.  Join us as we trace the river’s industrial legacy, its unique ecology, and its relationship to the city.  The walk is free, but places must be booked in advance; visit our Events page for more details and to reserve a place.  Please note that this event is now fully booked.  Contra Flow photograph (above) by Mary Musselwhite.

The Footing was recently acclaimed as ‘the best anthology of new work that I’ve read in years’ by journalist Billy Mills.  Click here to read his appraisal of the book for Sabotage Reviews.  A further selection of comments and reviews of The Footing appears on a new ‘Acclaim’ page on The Footing microsite.

‘I’ll get blind drunk / and walk out into the dusk city…’  Our current Featured Poem is Matthew Clegg‘s ‘Aphorisms…’, taken from his debut collection West North East.  Click here to read and to listen to the poem.  You can also listen to Clegg reading the poem (on location in Hillsborough) below:

Elaine Aldred‘s extended interview with Clegg, surveying his development as a writer, the shaping of West North East and his recent navigations of the South Yorkshire waterways, has just been published on her Strange Alliances blog; click here to read the interview.  A selection of comments and reviews of West North East appears on a new ‘Acclaim’ page on the West North East microsite.

A new pamphlet by Peter Riley will appear from Longbarrow Press later this spring; further details of The Ascent of Kinder Scout will be posted towards the end of February. We’ve created a short, spare film to accompany two ‘pieces’ from his 2012 pamphlet XIV PIECES:

Finally, Rob Hindle launches his new collection Yoke and Arrows (Smokestack Books) at Sheffield’s Lantern Theatre on Sunday 23 February (7.30pm).  These poems about Lorca, Granada and the Spanish Civil War will be given a dramatic presentation by Hindle and guitarist Rikki Thomas-Martinez.  Tickets available from the Lantern Theatre: click here to book.  Visit Rob Hindle’s website for more info about this event.

The latest collaboration in the ongoing Seven Wonders series of paintings, drawings and poems finds artist Paul Evans and poet Mark Goodwin travelling to Alport Castles, a landslip
feature in the Peak District, Derbyshire. The gritstone debris from this landslide towers over the valley for over half a mile; from a distance, the protruding mounds resemble castles. The instability of the site is reflected in Goodwin’s poem, which is also a response to Evans’ painting; you can view the poem and the painting here.

On the Longbarrow Blog, Angelina Ayers revisits Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘Pied Beauty’ and considers the symmetry and asymmetry of the sycamore leaf. You can read the essay here. Ayers is one of seven poets featured in the Longbarrow Press anthology The Footing; click here for more information about the book (and to listen to a short audio trailer featuring spoken contributions from all the poets).

Intersections and itineraries are the subjects of ‘Cartography, Flights and Traverses’, a new piece by Rob Hindle in which he recounts the making of his poems and sequences in The Footing, poems forged in ‘the moment[s] between getting lost and finding a way forward – between the original itinerary and a new route…’ Click here to read the essay. Among the ‘one-way journeys’ included in Hindle’s ‘Flights and Traverses’ is ‘Dore Moor to the Marples Hotel’, which takes the first night of the Sheffield Blitz as its historical (and imaginative) starting point; one of two bombing raids visited upon the city, sweeping from the south-western suburbs to the centre and culminating in a direct hit on the Marples Hotel in which approximately 70 people died. The supposed route of the Luftwaffe was re-walked by Hindle and others on 12 December 2010 (the 70th anniversary of the Blitz). This short film documents their journey from the moor’s edge to the heart of the city, against the traffic and the failing light:

The land slips east into night, fen ditches
glowing like pig-iron.  High in the thin air
the planes drum towards the coast.