The Halt

Just released - the 2nd episode of my interview with @thehalt.bsky.social for The Two-Way Poetry Podcast on his memoir Last Collection and my book Little Piece of Harm.

@petegreensolo.com @drjomaher.bsky.social @longbarrowpress.bsky.social @emmabolland.bsky.social

www.podbean.com/eas/pb-vgna2...

A field of sunflowers under a cloudy sky between Allerton Bywater and Castleton, West Yorkshire.

'My mother grew sunflowers. I’d look out of the window and see them standing up straight against the back fence. She was always planting ahead of time. I understood, at last, what it meant, in the year of her death, to see the garden through its seasons.'
longbarrowpress.substack.com/p/unrecovere...

Solar farm at Sudforth Lane, east of Knottingley, North Yorkshire.

'A day’s work. What is there to show for it. Think of storage. Think of distribution. In every corner. In every direction. Work going on. As far as the eye can see. Work going on. When you’re not looking.'

'Unrecovered Time': a walk from Leeds to Goole
longbarrowpress.substack.com/p/unrecovere...

Fuel storage tanks at the depot on Fleet Lane near Woodlesford, West Yorkshire.

'My sleep has been bad since Sunday, slow to come, then broken, and the day starts with something missing. Lorry, van, flatbed truck.'

'Unrecovered Time': an account of a day's walk from Leeds to Goole (lightly revised from the recent Bluesky thread)
longbarrowpress.substack.com/p/unrecovere...

No cross, no colour.
The fields marked and abandoned
by flag and flower.

The smuts are tethered overhead, black laterals, scudding into dross. All the blotting parallels backlit in a shelving mass. Each print takes more ink, the old colours showing through, stuck to the rollers. Half a coat of midnight blue, impermanent, unfinished.

Cyanotypes, strewn over East Halton Skitter, the flight calls of shanks and sandpipers. The flood wall sinking in the littoral. Cloud-chaff is total, the Humber particulate, the backlight snuffed out. Pearling east, a white ship floats one inch above the water.

A few poems re-presented as part of the Colour in Conversation residency / research project led by artists and writers Stu Burke, Gary Simmonds, and @emmabolland.bsky.social in Sheffield last week.

This Saturday, 2pm. I'm reading alongside @thehalt.bsky.social @rachelartsmith.bsky.social and Conor Rodgers as part of the Checked Out exhibition events programme. #Sheffield #poetry #prose #performance.

"At Bamforth Street tram stop the grass is banked with daffodil clumps and clouds of white blossom drift down from the crescents. My head is full of microns and kerning, little pencilled notes left over from the new book, 21mm margins, 13.9pt leading over 10.5pt text."

'Local Distribution'

"After my grandfather died, my mother discovered a cache of greetings cards in his desk drawer, birthdays and anniversaries, all of them stamped, unaddressed, unwritten. Occasions yet to come. This is what he remembered in a year of oesophageal cancer."

'Local Distribution'

"The mailer had made three or four tours of the postal network. I tried to work out the stages, the full itinerary, from the layers of handwritten and printed shipping labels and postage labels, I could only be certain of where it had ended up, the last known address."

'Local Distribution'

"To see the deciduous street tree, to see it from your window, always coming into leaf, even when it is not leafing, even when the leaves have gone, the idea of it and the eventual return, and then, one day, not to be there to see it, not to be there at all."

'Local Distribution'

"The gradient drops out and the houses on my left sink below the boundary walls and I decide that street trees are public amenities. Handmade posters in the upstairs windows, even now, are they fresh or just clinging to the light, a burst of yellow at the end of the road."

'Local Distribution'

"If blanks in the front matter are the book drawing breath then blanks in the end matter are the book exhaling. I often leave the last two pages blank for this reason. A blind folio need not be blank at all. It can be any page without a printed number."

'Local Distribution'

"The unwritten history of one borrowed book, a life out on loan, passing through other lives, across the city, beyond the city, wherever it is needed, no shelfmark, no bookplate, no due date. Slow distribution. Person to person. The map, or maps, that could show it all."

'Local Distribution'

"I think of the decisions forced by indecision, when it seemed that there were no good or right decisions, pick one, not that one, pick another, quick, the moment is passing. The moment passes and the decision is made or unmade and the future happens anyway. "

'Local Distribution'

"A bookmaker didn't make books, or lend them, or sell them, there were almost no books in the bookies. There was one book and it was kept behind the counter. It started off blank, pages of prophecies that would be proved true or untrue, the book of books had to balance."

'Local Distribution'

"In later years, when I was lost, or troubled, I would find my way back to the encyclopaedia, any volume, any page, everything you wanted to know. Entries that refer you to other entries. Subsections and colour-coded maps. It was organised and random. An index of solace."

'Local Distribution'

"I forget that my father was colour blind. It was explained to me as a child, I tried to imagine what it would be like to name a world without greens or reds, a uniform, for example, or a post box, but all I could see were pencilled greys where the colours should have been."

'Local Distribution'

The editor of Longbarrow Press, en route to the Small Publishers Fair in Holborn, London, with stock and accessories in two rucksacks and two carrier bags. Sheffield Midland Station, 6.11am, 27 October 2023. Photograph by Emma Bolland.

The books go to their readers, one by one, at times quickly, at times slowly, halfway around the world or halfway across the city. There is no supply chain, not as such, only the postal network, irregular events, direct sales to bookshops, local distribution.
longbarrowpress.substack.com/p/inventory

Sheffield Cathedral and the adjacent public space reflected in the window of a closed shop (April 2021).

"The card is for my mother. I will post it to her tomorrow. I don’t know when Easter cards became part of our lives. The card is left blank for the message and the message is the handwriting, nothing more."
longbarrowblog.wordpress.com/2021/12/23/l...

'We can dream a future, we can turn to the past, we can be anywhere but the present.'

A month of Lockdown Walks, walked and written up over 30 consecutive days, 24 March – 22 April 2020.

longbarrowblog.wordpress.com?s=lockdown+w...

'We can dream a future, we can turn to the past, we can be anywhere but the present.'

A month of Lockdown Walks, walked and written up over 30 consecutive days, 24 March – 22 April 2020.

longbarrowblog.wordpress.com?s=lockdown+w...

'To speak of class, if we speak of it, is to qualify it, at times defensively, at others apologetically, because class is never as simple as class. You can't think with it for long before it starts to slip. You can't confer it on yourself. You can't confer it on others.'

('Local Distribution')

The gilt-stamped, faux-leather spines of the Merit Students Encyclopedia (volumes 9-18 )

'The books of the Merit Students Encyclopedia were uniform in size. The volumes were divided by words, not letters, and the words were printed on the spine. BAT CAIRO. CLOISTER DIGITALIS. MASS MUSES. When I was old enough to open the books I reached for REVERE SHINTO.'

The gilt-stamped, faux-leather spines of the Merit Students Encyclopedia (volumes 9-18 )

'The books of the Merit Students Encyclopedia were uniform in size. The volumes were divided by words, not letters, and the words were printed on the spine. BAT CAIRO. CLOISTER DIGITALIS. MASS MUSES. When I was old enough to open the books I reached for REVERE SHINTO.'

October, a sleep
of communes, the dawn set back.
A federation
of stars, undivided, still
fixed in fields of Breton black.

On the hill, one note,
one bell, night rolling over.
Sea level. Blue shift.
One colour lifts another
until the province is lit.

White thorns, spinning sky,
each horizontal axis
sings the trinity.
One zenith, then another,
the crowns abide in the air.

"A red admiral, the only colour on the bridleway, the only colour in my mind. To step out of your own path, for a moment, to see yourself as a point on a line."

Longbarrow 2024 highlights #2: Slow Networks. 70 miles, 35 hours, 4 counties, 2 long barrows.
longbarrowpress.substack.com/p/slow-netwo...

Auerbach paintings always felt much more 'urgent' to me than Freud's. Work that needed to be done. Heresy, obvs, but there we are. The piece below is great, btw.