Helen Tookey

Next Pulp album, Morning Miss Marple, How’s the Leg…

I really hope someone brings this to Jarvis’s attention because he would surely LOVE it.

Support small publishers! Including the very excellent @longbarrowpress.bsky.social. Lovely to see our exploration of the Nova Scotian landscape travelling around.

The OK Gatsby
Man-Flu in Venice
The Wings of the Pigeon
Confessions of an English Toast-Eater
(I like this game!)

This was a great event in a lovely venue. Home-made cakes and bicycles repaired! (That’s one for any Jennings fans out there.) Thanks to Mary, and Brian, and everyone who came along.

Immediately made me think of Yvonne’s postcard in Under the Volcano: ‘Darling, why did I leave? Why did you let me?’

Congrats to Steve and to Longbarrow! Great news.

The pamphlet and CD editions of 'To the End of the Land' by Martin Heslop and Helen Tookey: the blue-grey coastal edge of Nova Scotia, with dilapidated wooden lobster traps in the foreground, sea and distant land beyond, and white clouds and blue sky above.

"Those places are so resonant, they speak of the past, but that inevitably makes you think of the future..."

@helentookey.bsky.social and @martinheslop.bsky.social on their new text/audio collaboration 'To the End of the Land'. Full interview here:
longbarrowpress.substack.com/p/on-the-air

For those of you in Liverpool, this is in stock at the fantastic @deadinkbooks.bsky.social on Smithdown Rd, along with all kinds of intriguing books you won’t find in other bookshops… so get down there and check it out!

Published today! Text and sound work by me and Martin Heslop, derived from a residency at the Elizabeth Bishop House in Nova Scotia, beautifully produced by Longbarrow Press.

Featured Poem Lake | Martin Heslop and Helen Tookey this country has a lake in it hour after hour the blue of it unfolds at my hand quiet companion the blue of it    like an earth hum a low song long salt water …

Here’s the text of one of the pieces from To the End of the Land, by Martin Heslop and me, out next week from Longbarrow Press longbarrowpress.com/featured-poem/

An edge of land in Nova Scotia: broken, splintered trees in the foreground; dark earth; a distant, curving line of trees; part-blue, part-clouded skies.

"It’s as though you’re able to stand outside the present and see yourself as a kind of ghost..."

@helentookey.bsky.social and @martinheslop.bsky.social on their new text/audio collaboration 'To the End of the Land'. Full interview here:
longbarrowpress.substack.com/p/on-the-air

So pleased to have this work coming out with the fantastic @longbarrowpress.bsky.social!

Really looking forward to this event at @deadinkbooks.bsky.social Smithdown Rd on 24th - Jake will be reading from his fantastic new book and we’ll be chatting about it:

Script lichen! What a fantastic name/descriptor.

Oops, pressed post too soon. Thanks to the AHRC for supporting this project. It started from thinking about Lowry’s stories in Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, which refer to the Isle of Man and have an overriding concern for the natural world.

Thanks to

Absolutely love the idea of error gardens.

Interesting. I’ve noticed this at work, and felt at odds with it, because I don’t think that it’s at all what I’m interested in as a writer. (And I doubt whether it’s primarily what many poets are interested in.) But I hadn’t really thought about it as symptomatic of a wider thing.

I really fancy the artisanal flans

Have you read Olga Ravn’s The Employees? It’s a brilliant, moving, unsettling sf novella that also skewers the language of ‘workflows’ and ‘upgrades’

University management seem to be suckers for pointless, expensive, third-party bits of software, none of which connect to each other, and which mostly just create more work. I assume ‘rolling out’ this stuff makes them feel like tech bros…

Our Canvas is currently promising ‘exciting new updates’. I’d rather stick my head in a bag of wet sand.

The Mersey, rippling across itself like a kind of static

Or, in my case, it’s often laziness - an unwillingness to be open to the demands of the thing, whatever they might turn out to be. I think this is partly why I so often find myself rereading the same books, listening to the same records.

I reckon it’s the unwillingness to give up the unbounded possibilities the thing holds in anticipation. For as long as you don’t watch/read etc the thing, it can have any properties, in your imagination, but once you do, it can only be itself.

Currently midway through my second reading of The Blue Hour. It’s one to take slowly, spend time in the rooms of the poems.

‘It is a far, far better thing…’

Absolutely love the whole series, and yes, I think that one is the scariest

Wow! Your pic reminds me of the illustrations to the Green Knowe books - kind of reversed-out pointilliste