Longbarrow Press

As part of the Occursus summer programme, Matthew Clegg will lead a guided walk and poetry workshop designed to explore the roles of movement and trance in the composition of poetry. Moving with thought will take place in Sheffield on Saturday 23 June (12pm–4pm); admission is free, but places are strictly limited and booking is essential. Please note that this event is now fully booked. Matthew Clegg will also be giving a reading in Sheffield on 23 June (a one-off presentation of poems that engage with the experience of walking, including selections from Nobody Sonnets, Edgelands and his forthcoming collection The Power-line). Venue, start time and other details will be added to our Events page shortly.

Luke Bennett takes up the theme of walking in his fascinating blog, with a recent post in which he reflects on the mapping of the Sheffield ‘Blitzscape’ undertaken by Rob Hindle in his sequence ‘Dore Moor to the Marples Hotel’ (from the forthcoming Longbarrow Press anthology The Footing); a series of poems based on a walk (from Sheffield’s southwestern outskirts to its centre) which Hindle re-walked (with audience) on 12 December 2010 (the 70th anniversary of the Sheffield blitz). You can read Bennett’s commentary here. A fragment of location footage from the December 2010 walk (which prompted Bennett’s reflections) can be viewed here; the poem read by Hindle in the film (‘Ecclesall Woods’) appears in full here.

We’ve also created a new Longbarrow Podcasts page on SoundCloud (to showcase our longer sequences of location recordings); click here to listen to the ‘sound corridors’ made by Matthew Clegg, Andrew Hirst and Chris Jones during walks in and around Sheffield’s back streets and waterways in 2008 and 2009.

Alistair Noon and Matthew Clegg will be giving a joint reading at The Red Deer, Sheffield, on Saturday 19 May (7.30pm prompt start; admission free). Berlin-based translator and poet Noon will present a selection of poems from his recent Longbarrow Press pamphlets Across the Water and Swamp Area (and Earth Records, his first full-length collection from Nine Arches). Clegg will be reading new and unpublished work from his sequences The Navigators and Chinese Lanterns. The two poets have devised an evening of journeys; from the urban waterways of South Yorkshire to the rivers, lakes and seas of Central Europe (and further afield), accompanied by Li Po, Coleridge, Mao and others. You can listen to Alistair Noon read extracts from Swamp Area here; a recording of Matthew Clegg reading ‘Li Po’s Letter to Rumi’ (from Chinese Lanterns) can be found here.

We’ve uploaded the first in an occasional series of short films to our new Vimeo page: click here to see Andrew Hirst reading poems from The Frome Primer (on location in Grimsby) and to view the film accompanying Matthew Clegg’s Lost Between Stations (you can also watch Lost Between Stations via the embedded link below).

Recent posts on the Longbarrow Blog include Chris Jones’ reading of ‘Howl’ (the movie) and Mark Goodwin’s Ordnance Survey lament. Our Soundcloud site features new recordings from Kelvin Corcoran (a preview of his new ‘Sea Table’ sequence) and Andrew Hirst (an excerpt from his 2008 collection ‘Songs to Make & Mend’). Elsewhere on the web, Chris Jones has redesigned and relaunched his website (with several new features) and Rob Hindle concludes his blog‘s excellent mini-series of guest poets from Northern Ireland with a poem by Damian Smyth (the other poets in the series are Moyra Donaldson and Martin Mooney). You can also read work-in-progress from his collaboration with the artist Mark Dunn here.

The faithful come to confess their failings:

bells echo across the water:
wrenches striking a freighter.

(from ‘Across the Water’, Alistair Noon).