Longbarrow Press

Longbarrow Press marks its fifth anniversary with a series of new titles for summer 2011. The first to appear is Lee Harwood’s The Books, a limited edition pamphlet measuring 9cm x 13cm, housed in a bespoke envelope and signed by the author. The Books will be available from Longbarrow Press at the end of April; a recording of Harwood reading the poem will also be posted on our SoundCloud site to coincide with publication.

Matthew Clegg’s Lost Between Stations follows in May; this sequence of narrative poems is presented as seven ‘loose leaves’ folded into a specially designed wallet, and is accompanied by a full-length CD of Clegg reading the poems on location in Leeds (an excerpt from the CD will be posted on SoundCloud in early May). From the introduction: 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. Details of the Sheffield launch of Lost Between Stations will follow shortly.

Later this summer, Longbarrow Press will publish its first full-length book: The Footing is an anthology of specially commissioned poems on the theme of walking, with substantial contributions from James Caruth, Matthew Clegg, Mark Goodwin, Rob Hindle, Andrew Hirst and Chris Jones. With the exception of Matthew Clegg’s Edgelands (which, along with James Caruth’s long poem Dark Peak, provided the impetus for the project), the poems and sequences of The Footing are previously unpublished. 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. The anthology comprises Tithes by James Caruth, Edgelands by Matthew Clegg, St Juliot by Mark Goodwin, Flights and Traverses by Rob Hindle, Three Night Walks by Andrew Hirst, and Death and the Gallant by Chris Jones. You can listen to an extract from Edgelands here; further recordings of poems from The Footing will be uploaded to SoundCloud in the coming weeks.

Longbarrow Press will also be publishing new titles by Andrew Hirst (Hello Dolly) and Alistair Noon (Across the Water and Swamp Area) in the next few months; further details will be posted here shortly.

The three events organised by Longbarrow Press as part of the inaugural Sheffield Poetry Festival were highly acclaimed and well-attended (with the Saturday events attracting capacity crowds). Death and the Gallant (an exhibition by the artist Paul Evans and the poet Chris Jones) was expertly introduced by Matthew Clegg, who offered some thoughts on the nature of ‘collaboration’; this set the tone for a reading, talk and discussion that was both tightly plotted and animated by wit and invention. For more information about the exhibition please visit http://bankstreetarts.com/exhibitions/death-and-the-gallant-2/

‘Collaboration’ was a theme common to the weekend’s events: we returned to Bank Street Arts in the evening for the keenly anticipated Yannis Told Us, a unique synthesis of poetry and music by Tria Kalistos (Kelvin Corcoran and multi-instrumentalists Maria Pavlidou and Howard Wright). This was the debut public performance of the work (and, indeed, the group); the level of communication between Corcoran, Pavlidou and Wright – and their connection with the audience – had many listeners thinking otherwise. Intimate, urgent and assured, the set was enthusiastically received by the packed-out room. Yannis Told Us will be released on CD by Longbarrow Press later this year.

The third and final event, Making It Up, was a specially commissioned talk by Kelvin Corcoran on the nature of dialogue (real and imagined) with other poets (living and dead). Corcoran’s discussion embraced the cultural politics of late modernism, the value of chance experience, and the primacy of song; a dialogue with a dead poet (Ezra Pound) led to a dialogue with a living poet (Peter Riley), with Corcoran and Riley closing the event with a joint reading that drew on Riley’s Alstonefield and Corcoran’s own response to reading the poem.

Many thanks to all who attended, supported and helped with the events; in particular, the Sheffield Poetry Festival team, Bank Street Arts, Matthew Clegg, and Karl and Hayley. Thanks also to Ian Gracey for photographing the Death and the Gallant exhibition.