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Meridian: £12.99 (hardback)

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writing along an invisible 
line whose end is infinite

‘Meridian is a charged meditation … lyrical, political and nuanced.’—Katrina Naomi

Meridian is Nancy Gaffield‘s third full-length poetry collection. A beautifully produced 112-page hardback, it is available from Longbarrow Press for £12.99 (+ P&P). You can order the book securely by clicking on the relevant PayPal button above. Read an excerpt from Part I of Meridian here, and a further excerpt (from Part II) here. Click here to read ‘The First Cut’, a Longbarrow Blog post by Nancy Gaffield, reflecting on the walking and writing of Meridian. A further essay considers the role of ’embodied experience’ in shaping the project’s development; click here to read ‘The Last Step’.

Wealden, a new collaborative work (with The Drift) comprising a 28-page pamphlet and 28-minute CD, appeared from Longbarrow Press in November 2020; you can order the pamphlet and CD here.

Between 2015 and 2017, Nancy Gaffield walked the 270-mile Greenwich Meridian Trail from Peacehaven to Sand le Mere, in order to investigate the way that landscapes are disturbed and reordered by history and memory. In Meridian, the line of longitude is the ‘zero point’ through which these forces speak: the intersecting planes of poetry and song, politics and the polis, land and sea, presence and absence, shadow and light.

‘Nancy Gaffield’s bravely resourceful long poem takes us ‘true North’ with her along the variegated trails marking England’s portion of the Meridian. Her lithe, varied poetic lines embody the present and the historic, the minute and the gargantuan, the simple and complex, the everyday and the artistic, the expected and the surprising—the physical, mental, and emotional experience of her explorations. Combining meditations, reactions, observations, memories with striking ideas, inspired descriptions, literary recalls, the poem captures everything from dirt to ecology to philosophy. Readers will prize this important, inspiring book: the Line, lines, a life brilliantly fused.’
—Lou Rowan

Nancy Gaffield’s first collection of poetry, Tokaido Road (CB editions 2011) was nominated for the Forward Best First Collection Prize and was awarded the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize that year. Her second collection, Owhere (Templar 2012) won a Templar Poetry Pamphlet Award that year. Subsequent poetry publications include Continental Drift (Shearsman 2014), the chapbooks Zyxt (Oystercatcher 2015) and Meridian (Oystercatcher 2016), and a libretto, Tokaido Road: A Journey after Hiroshige (Shearsman 2014). Meridian is her first collection with Longbarrow Press.