Longbarrow Press

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.

The publication of our walking-themed anthology The Footing was marked at The Shakespeare, Sheffield on 25 November with an evening of readings, performances and talks by all seven poets featured in the book. Angelina Ayers, James Caruth, Mark Goodwin, Rob Hindle, Andrew Hirst, Chris Jones and Fay Musselwhite plotted a unique route through the landscapes of the anthology: its dark cities, luminous coasts, hidden waterways and exposed hilltops. Photographers Emma Bolland and Karl Hurst were on hand to document the evening’s performances; you can view their images here. A sound-walk through The Footing, featuring spoken contributions from the poets and narration by Emma Bolland, is now available to hear (click on the ‘Play’ button below):

On the Longbarrow Blog, Matthew Clegg considers the influence of panic attack syndrome on some of the poems in his debut collection West North East. Click here to read ‘The A-bomb of adrenaline’. An earlier post, ‘Ground Sense’, explores the terrain and characters that inform his poem ‘Sirens’ (also featured in West North East). Click here to read the essay.

The Footing and West North East are currently available from Longbarrow Press at just £12 each (inc UK P&P); you can also buy both books here (via PayPal) for just £22 (inc UK P&P).

Our current Featured Poem is Fay Musselwhite‘s ‘Path Kill’ (from The Footing); click here to read the poem and to listen to Musselwhite reading it on location in Sheffield.