Today I welcome Chris Campbell to reflect upon a poem from his poignant new collection…

The title-poem of my recently published collection, White Eye of the Needle, captures a moment my now wife and I climbed into a landmark at the top of a piste on a ski trip. 

We took our skis off, left our poles and climbed up with a couple of friends into a rock formation called the ‘Eye of the Needle’ to admire the view and take photos. It was the first time my wife and I, who met that week, almost kissed, before we hurried back to ski down the mountain.

The ‘Eye of the Needle’ sits at over 2,700 metres in Tignes, France, and has a large hole through the middle. It looks down over the resort and there’s a tough black run on the other side. You can see the formation illustrated on…

Longbarrow Press is delighted to announce the publication of Wealden, a new pamphlet and CD by Nancy Gaffield and The Drift.

Nancy had previously published Meridian (Longbarrow Press, 2019), a long poem that articulates an exploratory journey along the Greenwich Meridian line across Eastern England. Meanwhile, The Drift had been creating semi-improvised music inspired by the landscape around them – the marshes and the dense woodlands of rural Kent. They agreed to collaborate on a new work, where Nancy would explore this extraordinary Kentish landscape, walking from the High Weald down to the coast at Dungeness. Much of the land she traversed is only a few hundred years old, formed by shingle and silt thrown up by storms. This same landscape may only last for another few hundred years, as the sea level continues to rise. Wealden deals with the strata – geological, cultural and historical – that…

‘Our experiences of the empty spaces of the marshes, the dense woodland and the deserted beaches were in our minds as we played. We thought of the deep loamy bass as the subsoil, the loops of abstract sound as the rugged flora, and the occasional higher-pitched elements — like the fiddle or the harmonium — as fleeting glimpses of wildlife, weather events, or other people.’  Following the release of their collaborative project Wealden, Nancy Gaffield and The Drift discuss the development of the work in a wide-ranging interview, from its improvisatory origins (and field-based research in the marshes, shingle, and dense woodlands of southern Kent) to the ‘collective exploration’ by poet and musicians captured in the studio recordings. Click here to read ‘Walking, observing, listening’ on the Longbarrow Blog.  ‘The words inform the sound and the sound influences the words. And through it all, the magical strangeness of…