Longbarrow Press

We step up onto the shoulder, the cloud disperses, the land retreats before us, walking backwards into private estates…

The Downfall (revisited) comprises two new paintings by Paul Evans and two excerpts from a new work by Peter Riley (The Ascent of Kinder Scout). It is the fifth work to develop from the year’s Seven Wonders collaborations and revisits the site(s) of a notable physical and cultural landmark of the Peak District: Kinder Scout. View The Downfall (revisited) here.

The Seven Wonders series (which continues in 2013) was one of many highlights in a busy year for Longbarrow Press. Here’s a summary of our most memorable events, projects and publications in 2012:
#1  January.  The year begins with two new pamphlets by Alistair Noon. Across the Water crosses and recrosses the rivers, lakes and seas of Central Europe (and further afield); Swamp Area explores the slippery terrain of the modern city-state (post-reunification Berlin). Listen to Noon reading ‘Filling the Triangle’ (on location) here.
#2  April.  The publication of Peter Riley‘s XIV PIECES pamphlet and CD, for which Riley creates a series of home recordings that incorporate the ‘presence’ of the domestic (and several musical offerings) to great effect. Listen to ‘Floating Verse’ here.
#3  May.  The first of several Longbarrow short films is uploaded to our Vimeo site. Over the course of the year, the films range from documentary and performance to dream-like meditations; at the heart of each project is a commitment to craft a response to the poem that is both innovative and sympathetic. View our Vimeo films here.
#4  June.  Artist Paul Evans‘ Seven Wonders project resumes. This series of collaborations between Evans and an expanding cast of poets (in 2012, Angelina Ayers, Mark Goodwin, Fay Musselwhite, Alistair Noon and Peter Riley) yields five new works (based on the natural ‘wonders’ of the Peak District). Visit the Seven Wonders website here.
#5  June.  Matthew Clegg‘s Moving with Thought walk and workshop explores the relationship between walking and poetry – between the body, the mind and the landscape. The workshop participants responded to the invitation with some excellent poems; click here to read them and to access further links to audio recordings of the poems and a short film of the walk.
#6  September.  Inspired by the mystery of bird calls and songs, Call & Response (co-curated by Paul Evans and Brian Lewis) presents 22 new haiku by 10 poets (broadcast via Twitter and SoundCloud) as part of The University of Sheffield’s Festival of the Mind. Click here to read the haiku.
#7  September.  A Navigation with Matthew Clegg leads an audience of 20 along the Sheffield Canal for a poetry walk that illuminates the culture and history of this quiet, bewitching otherworld. Listen to Clegg reading his poem ‘Attercliffe’ towards the end of the walk here.
#8  October.  Longbarrow Press: Scale, a series of newly commissioned films and performances, takes place at Sheffield’s Bloc Projects. A performance of ‘Scale’ offers a mix of live readings, film and a new performance devised by Becky Bowley and Mark Goodwin; an artist’s talk by Paul Evans illuminates the ideas of ‘scale’ at work in the programme. Click here for more information about the Scale collaborations.
#9  October.  Rob Hindle’s The Purging of Spence Broughton, a Highwayman returns to Hill Top Chapel, Attercliffe, Sheffield with a new cast of supporting readers (Matt Black, James Caruth, Ray Hearne, Chris Jones and Fay Musselwhite). Click here to read more about Rob Hindle’s (re)telling of the Spence Broughton story.
#10  November.  Our pioneering audio work continues with the podcast of Matthew Clegg‘s new sequence, Cave Time and Sea Changes, based on recordings made by Clegg and Lewis during a visit to a sea cave near Flamborough Head. Clegg’s readings of the poems are punctuated by reflections on the writing of the sequence, memories of earlier visits to the coast, observations on the effects of light within the cave, and the constant presence of the tide ‘as it gulps back / Or sighs forward, swell by swell’. Listen to the podcast here.
#11  November.  closer to ground to hear, a collaborative work by Mark Goodwin (audio poems and texts), Nikki Clayton (photographs) and Brian Lewis (sound design), is installed at Bank Street Arts, Sheffield. A merging of Tarkovsky’s Zone with the rurban rim of north-east Sheffield, the installation is reshaped by Lewis during the residency. Click here to visit the closer to ground to hear site.
#12  December.  The year draws to a close with the publication of Andrew Hirst‘s Hello Dolly, a triptych of long poems exploring (and employing) the strategies of rhetoric and public speech. Listen to Hirst’s uncompromising views on Robert Browning, Patty Hearst and Teddy Kennedy, politics and poetics, and the (mis)management of culture in this candid, compelling podcast.

2013 will see the publication of The Footing, an anthology of specially commissioned poems on the theme of walking, and West North East, the debut full-length collection by Matthew Clegg. Further information about these titles will be posted here in the near future.

…speech fills up
prepared corners like sand, the light threshing over
the marsh flats beyond, only the dark sweat of tankers
left for an horizon pushed to its limit.

Longbarrow Press is proud to announce the publication of a bold new work by Andrew Hirst (aka photo-grapher Karl Hurst). HELLO DOLLY is a triptych of long poems (‘Tithonus, 1972’, ‘Chappaquiddick, 1980’ and ‘Welund’s Lament’) presented as three individual landscape-format pamphlets with an accompanying 3″ CD of Hirst reading the poems at home in Sheffield. The themes explored in the poems include power (and its decline), public speech, and the failure of rhetoric, obliquely referencing ancient and contemporary myth through the personae of Tithonus (via Tennyson’s poem), Edward Kennedy and Wayland (or Wēland) the Smith. You can listen to Hirst reading ‘Welund’s Lament’ here. To order the three pamphlets and CD (packaged in a handmade, hand-stamped envelope) at the special price of £10 (inc UK p&p), please click here. Listen to Hirst discussing the poems in the podcast below:

Artist Paul Evans‘ collaborative projects continue with a new response to the landscapes of the Peak District created with Berlin-based poet Alistair Noon. The latest addition to the 2012 series of The Seven Wonders focuses on The Burbage Valley, which lies 8km north-west of Sheffield and is largely formed of millstone grit and shale. Evans has created a sequence of six drawings in response to Noon’s poem; the poem and drawings trace a route through the valley towards ‘the developing relicts’. You can read the poem and view the first of these drawings here. A short film comprising all six drawings, the poem and a soundtrack by Brian Lewis can be viewed here. Alistair Noon has also contributed a new essay to the Longbarrow Blog, reporting from (and reflecting on) the wealth redistribution demo that moved through Berlin on 29 September; click here to read ‘Traces of the Middle Ages’.

Becky Bowley, Nikki Clayton and Mark Goodwin reflect on their participation in Longbarrow Press: Scale (a programme of new films, artworks and performance that took place at Sheffield’s Bloc Projects in October) in a new text by Bowley and an edited conversation between Clayton and Goodwin. You can read and listen to their meditations on From the high ground our own Body here. A selection of Nikki Clayton’s photographs for the recent closer to ground to hear installation (which took place at Bank Street Arts in November) can be viewed here; a recording of Goodwin improvising with (and against) his ‘Stalker’ poem (made in the installation space) is available here.

Our current ‘Featured Poem’ is ‘Last Night’ by Fay Musselwhite; you can read the poem here and listen to Musselwhite reading the poem (on location in Walkley, Sheffield) here.