Longbarrow Press

Longbarrow Press, in association with artists Paul Evans and Becky Bowley, presents a series of new works at Sheffield’s Bloc Projects embracing performance, painting, photography and poetry. Scale will focus on collaborations between Bowley, Evans, photographer Karl Hurst and Leeds-based artist Hondartza Fraga and poets Angelina Ayers, James Caruth, Matthew Clegg, Mark Goodwin, Rob Hindle, Chris Jones and Fay Musselwhite. The works will explore ideas of scale from the micro to the macro, in relation both to human physicality and the landscape, and between the cells, tissues and organs of the body itself. The Scale programme runs from Wed 24 to Sat 27 October; for further information (including details of the performance on Friday 26 October and a new essay by Matthew Clegg) please visit the Scale website.

October will also see the relaunch of Rob Hindle‘s acclaimed dramatic sequence The Purging of Spence Broughton, a Highwayman. Hindle (with guest readers James Caruth, Ray Hearne, Chris Jones and Fay Musselwhite) will perform the work in the unique setting of Hill Top Chapel, Attercliffe, Sheffield at 6.30pm on Sunday 28 October. Links to poems, essays and recordings can be found on our new Spence Broughton website; for booking information and detailed directions to the Hill Top Chapel performance, please click here.

Our Call & Response haiku series (comprising 22 bird-themed poems broadcast on Twitter and SoundCloud in late September) is now available as an eight-minute suite on SoundCloud featuring the recordings of the haiku in their original broadcast sequence. Click here to listen to the poets reading all 22 haiku in locations ranging from Creswell Crags to the suburbs of Sheffield.

We’ve also uploaded an excerpt from A Navigation with Matthew Clegg, which found the poet walking with and reading to an audience of 20 along the towpath of the Sheffield Canal on 23 September. Click here to listen to Clegg introducing and reading the poem ‘Attercliffe’ (in the shadow of Attercliffe bridge) and here for field recordings of the canal basin.

As part of the University of Sheffield’s Festival of the Mind (20-30 September 2012), Longbarrow Press has co-curated two new works that engage with ideas of nature and place. Call & Response (conceived by the artist Paul Evans and co-curated with Brian Lewis) will bring together haiku poems by 10 writers – Angelina Ayers, Matthew Clegg, Abigail Flint, Mark Goodwin, Rob Hindle, Chris Jones, Fay Musselwhite, Mary Marken, Andrew Myers and Ruth Palmer – inspired by the mystery of bird calls and songs. Each day from 20-30 September 2012 we will be posting two new haiku on Twitter (@Callhaiku). Recordings of the poets reading each haiku will be simultaneously uploaded to our SoundCloud site. Over the course of 10 days this will build into a cumulative dawn chorus of surprising lyrical invention and beauty. Call & Response is one of a series of creative collaborations between Paul Evans and Professor Tim Birkhead devised for Festival of the Mind: visit Evans’ Animal Magic site to find out more about the project.

We are also pleased to announce that Matthew Clegg will be leading a poetry walk around Sheffield’s canal basin during Festival of the Mind, reading poems from his sequence The Navigators (which explores the canals of South Yorkshire and their histories). A Navigation with Matthew Clegg will take place on Sunday 23 September at 2pm, departing from the Festival’s Arrivals Zone kiosk outside Sheffield Railway Station (opposite the main entrance). Please note that this event is now fully booked. To find out more about the Arrivals Zone programme, click here.

Finally, we’ve created a new History page to illustrate the development of Longbarrow Press – through events, collaborations and publications – since its launch in 2006. A number of (hitherto unseen) archive photographs and useful links have been added to the timeline: more will be uploaded in the near future. Many thanks to Nikki Clayton for her contributions to the photographic archive.