On Wednesday evening I walked up some very steep hills from Sheffield city centre to Novel bookshop – whose website is here – in Crookes for an evening of readings by seven poets published by Brian Lewis’s Longbarrow Press. The ethos of Longbarrow – whose tagline, ‘poetry from the edgelands’, very much resonates with me and whose website is here – is concerned with making beautiful, mostly hardback books of beautiful poetry.
The readings took the form of half the audience sitting downstairs in the shop’s back room and the other half upstairs, with, in the first half of the evening, three poets reading downstairs and four upstairs; then, after a break, the poets changing over and the audiences staying where they were. The cosiness of the rooms and the excellence of the poetry made for a much more intimate yet paradoxically relaxing set of readings. The poets were James Caruth, Angelina D’Roza, Matthew Clegg, Steve Ely, Pete Green, Chris Jones and Fay Musselwhite, all of whom have distinctive writing and reading styles. While I’ve heard James Caruth and Steve Ely read before, the other five were new to me as readers of their work, although I have some of their books on my shelves..
I’ve known James Caruth, as ‘Jim’, for about 10 years, from when I first started attending Poetry Business writing days in Sheffield. Those days were remarkable, not just because Ann and Peter Sansom’s writing exercises were so fine and helpful, but also due to the very high quality of the poets who attended and seemingly wrote masterpieces in no more than seven or eight minutes. Among them, perhaps the most distinctive voices were the late John Foggin and Jim. Jim hails from Belfast originally and his accent is so mellifluous that he could read almost anything and make it sound fabulous; thankfully, his poems are equally fine. He’s had a few pamphlets out with Longbarrow, Poetry Salzburg and Smith|Doorstop (the Poetry Business’s imprint), and had poems included in a terrific Longbarrow anthology, The Footing, but it’s his collection Speechless at Inch which most fully represents Jim’s talent. It was shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize, an incredible accolade; nevertheless, the book went a bit under the radar, which is a real pity because it was, and is, tremendous and, for my money, as eminently readable and memorable as any collection published in English so far this decade. It’s available on the Poetry Business website here, where you can read a sample of the poems before spending less than a tenner on a real beauty of a book.
Tag: smith-doorstop
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On Longbarrow Press and James Caruth
Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff 