Longbarrow Press

Longbarrow Press marks the new season with a round-up of recent and forthcoming publications, interviews and recordings.

To coincide with the launch of online ordering for Longbarrow titles via PayPal (further details below), we’ve compiled a 40-minute CD drawing on the growing archive of ‘field recordings’ made by Longbarrow Press over the last 3 years. The first Longbarrow Press audio anthology (£4 inc P&P) is a rich, varied introduction to the press and its poets, and features James Caruth, Matthew Clegg, Kelvin Corcoran, Mark Goodwin, Lee Harwood, Rob Hindle, Andrew Hirst, Chris Jones and Alistair Noon reading their work in a range of settings, from kitchens to moorland, cellars to sea caves. Click here to view the full tracklisting and to order the CD.

We’ve redesigned our Publications page with full product descriptions for each title and PayPal buttons for online ordering. You can browse and order by clicking on the title of the publication, or search by author name via the Publications sub-menu. All prices are inclusive of UK postage and packing; we will be adding options for European and ROW orders during October.

The title of this post is borrowed from Andrew Hirst’s remarkable photo-series, Sketches for Autumn, a slideshow of which can be viewed here (Hirst’s ongoing work on Flickr, including his current series Leaf Studies and Sketches for Winter, can be viewed here). Hirst discusses his photography in a recent interview with Jana Kománková on the Czech website Proti šedi.

Continuing the autumnal theme, we’re posting Matthew Clegg’s ‘Trig Points’ sequence on Twitter throughout October (a haiku a day). Click here to follow Longbarrow Press on Twitter; you can listen to Clegg and guitarist Simon Heywood performing ‘Trig Points’ here (scroll down the page). Following the recent launch of Clegg’s pamphlet Lost Between Stations, we’ve posted his in-depth discussion of the sequence with poet Fay Musselwhite on the In Conversation page. You can also hear an interview with Brian Lewis of Longbarrow Press (conducted by Peter Spafford for elfm as part of the station’s Side Salad) here (the interview is eight minutes long and starts at around the 32 minute mark).

Several new publications are due from Longbarrow in the coming weeks: Andrew Hirst’s triptych Hello Dolly, Alistair Noon’s Swamp Area and Across the Water (two new pamphlets) and Kelvin Corcoran’s Words Through a Hole Where Once There Was a Chimpanzee’s Face will appear between now and December. Further details will be posted here and on the Forthcoming page. Finally… the Longbarrow Press recording programme continues, with recent uploads to our SoundCloud sites including Andrew Hirst’s Frome XIV, Chris Jones’ Wicker and James Caruth’s Quaker Grave.

Longbarrow Press is proud to announce the publication of Matthew Clegg’s Lost Between Stations on 25 September. This sequence of narrative poems is presented as seven ‘loose leaves’ folded into a specially designed wallet, and is accompanied by a 4o minute CD of Clegg reading the poems on location in Leeds (click here to listen to the first poem in the sequence). Lost Between Stations will be available to order online (via PayPal) from 1 October and can also be purchased at the launch (see details below).

Lost Between Stations will be launched at The Red Deer in Sheffield on Sunday 25 September (8pm start). The sequence is given a suitably inventive presentation for this one-off event, with film, photography and music framing Clegg’s readings. Afterwards, Clegg will be joined by poet Fay Musselwhite for a discussion of the ideas and influences at work in Lost Between Stations. Free admission (and cake) – all welcome.

The many ‘stations’ the poet is ‘lost between’ include a sense of his ‘type’, of his vocation, and of his social status and affiliation. The poem is ‘lost between’ autobiography and fiction, between epic, narrative, lyric and drama – even between poetry and prose. It was written under a conviction that we are most alive precisely during these vulnerable and indeterminate periods.