Longbarrow Press

Longbarrow Press is delighted to announce the publication of its first two full-length collections this September. The first of these, Matthew Clegg‘s West North East, is a book in three parts, each comprising a different approach to ideas of crisis, journey and imaginative crossing. Fugue presents a journey from the periphery towards points off the map; Edgelands (reworked from the 2008 pamphlet edition) maps a border territory; Chinese Lanterns finds the Edgelands poet returning changed (or estranged) before preparing for a new departure. You can read extracts from the book on the new West North East microsite, and listen to several poems from the opening section in the podcast below (recorded on location in snowbound North Sheffield earlier this year):

September also sees the publication of the long-awaited walking-themed anthology The Footing, comprising substantial contributions from poets Angelina Ayers, James Caruth, Mark Goodwin, Rob Hindle, Andrew Hirst, Chris Jones and Fay Musselwhite. City, country and coast (and the spaces in between) are the settings for these journeys; here, the act of walking is, by turns, exploratory, destructive, restorative, defiant, contemplative and devotional. Further details can be found on The Footing microsite (along with essays, films and recordings). Here’s the first poem in James Caruth’s ‘Tithes’:

On the Longbarrow Blog, Brian Lewis discusses the art of the poetry film in ‘Motion Studies’, while photographer Karl Hurst considers the relationship between image-making and island thinking in ‘My Island Home’. Finally, Angelina Ayers previews a new exhibition (curated by artist Rachel Smith) at Sheffield’s Bank Street Arts in August: click here for further details on Angelina’s blog.

The first of Longbarrow Press’s three events featured in this year’s Sheffield Poetry Festival was The Flight, a programme of short films (curated by Brian Lewis) that explored ideas of memory and movement. The Flight opened with the premiere of Murmuration, a collaboration between Paul Evans and Chris Jones:

Ideas of flight also transport us to the East Yorkshire coast. The chalk headland of Flamborough is the setting of Matthew Clegg‘s atmospheric audio work Cave Time and Sea Changes (recorded in a sea cave last September); the poem-sequence is revisited by online magazine Wild Culture and artist Rebecca French here. Spurn Head (a fragile sand spit largely formed of longshore drift from Flamborough) is the focal point of Eastings, the concluding part of Brian Lewis‘s account of a meridian-crossing new year’s walk through the flatlands of Holderness. Click here to read the essay.

On the Longbarrow Blog, Angelina Ayers considers Sylvia Plath, mixtapes and Turkish Delight in ‘31 Songs‘, while Matthew Clegg reflects on the challenges (and possibilities) of achieving the ‘intimate and strange’ conditions necessary for poetry in ‘The Dream House‘. Excerpts from Ayers and Clegg’s readings for the Sheffield Poetry Festival have been uploaded to SoundCloud; click here to listen to Ayers reading her poem ‘Days’ at Bank Street Arts; click here to listen to Clegg reading ‘A Letter From Tu Fu’ (from his forthcoming collection West North East).

The paths of flood and fire were retraced by Rob Hindle in his Flights and Traverses city walk earlier in June; listen here to Hindle reading and discussing poems that reimagine the 1864 Sheffield Flood and the Sheffield Blitz (recorded on the edge of the ‘old’ city). Finally, the flooding of the River Neva – and the flight of a young man left homeless by its ravages – are the themes of Alexander Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, which appeared in a bold, inventive new translation by Alistair Noon in 2010. Noon’s dynamic reading of the poem (given at the Sheffield Poetry Festival on 2 June 2013) appears below: