Announcing the forthcoming publication of ARCHIPELAGO Issue Four, available in late November / early December 2009 It’s three years and three issues since ARCHIPELAGO’s keel was laid, her plot hatched. That our crews and their hauls have been stellar is indisputable. I wave a grateful hanky to them from the dark depths of the engine room. We’ve met much praise from reception committees ashore. Subscriptions have increased in number quite remarkably, and our catchment of postcodes is truly archipelagic, at all points of the compass. You, our subscribers, are our part-owners and agents in the venture, like stakeholders in the Pequod. Each issue is a report to you and we try to do our utmost for you out on the…
Author: andrew
Launch of Once by Andrew McNeillie
Clutag Press would like to extend to you the following invitation: If you are unable to attend the event but would like more information or to order the book, you can do so on-line at www.seren-books.com
ARCHIPELAGO Issue Three
Announcing the forthcoming publication of ARCHIPELAGO Issue Three, available in late February / early March 2009 The third issue of ARCHIPELAGO embarks on rough seas in a troubled world. It does so once again in the spirit of Herman Melville’s character Ishmael, who shipped aboard the doomed Pequod, metaphor for America and the western enterprise. Ishmael called his whaling voyage ‘a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances’ : namely a presidential election and a ‘Bloody Battle in Afghanistan’. So it is for ARCHIPELAGO. Our voyage is a brief interlude, a cry in the wilderness, across the waste of waters, in the wake of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the luxury yacht Climate Change. Undaunted we…
ARCHIPELAGO Issue Two
Announcing the forthcoming publication of ARCHIPELAGO Issue Two, available in the first week of April 2008 The ARCHIPELAGO venture began as a fishing trip. Now I find myself aboard an ark, though an ark is a ferry to eventual survival. And am I Noah, or Ahab? What is my covenant? Anyway, call me Ishmael, there have for months been queues at the harbour to come aboard. Poets and artists jostled, waving sheaves of poems and images from the pierhead, like a flurry of gulls at the back of a trawler. The ink was barely dry on issue 1. Now the hold’s more than full, two by two. So we’re embarking again, this April, forecasting the full gamut of weather, in…
ARCHIPELAGO at The Bodleian
On Tuesday 9th October the Bodleian Library, Oxford, hosted an evening to celebrate the publication of ARCHIPELAGO and to mark the acquisition of the Clutag Press archives from conception to the present. The evening included readings by a number of contributors to Issue One, including Seamus Heaney. The Bodleian also chose this event to launch its first series of BODcasts, which are now online and available for all to re-live what was a truly wonderful evening. Our thanks go to all those at the library who’s efforts made this auspicious evening possible. To access the BODcasts click here The photos shown here were taken at the pre-event drinks.
ARCHIPELAGO in The Guardian
Robert Macfarlane writes of all things archipelagic in The Guardian, Saturday 14th July, including reference to Clutag’s ARCHIPELAGO: “Last month saw the appearance of a new journal called Archipelago, with which I have been involved. It was conceived of and is edited by the poet Andrew McNeillie, and its original aims were to provide a home for the new archipelagic art, and to inspire and embody a return to the land – and seascapes – of these islands. It is impressively rangy in terms of form (reportage, criticism, poetry, photographs and artwork) and language (English, Welsh, Gaelic, Russian and Anglo-Saxon). Established artists presenting new material include Seamus Heaney, Roger Deakin, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Bernard O’Donoghue, the painter Norman Ackroyd,…
ARCHIPELAGO at Emmanuel College, Cambridge
The first issue of ARCHIPELAGO was successfully launched as part of the Passionate Natures conference held at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, 22-24 June 2007. Readers included Andrew McNeillie (Senior Commissioning Editor, OUP, and Director of Clutag Press), Dr Leo Mellor (Fellow in English, New Hall College) and Robert Macfarlane (Fellow in English, Emmanuel College). They read from a selection of work by contributors including Roger Deakin, Seamus Heaney and Mick Imlah. Look out for a feature on ARCHIPELAGO in the Guardian newspaper soon.
Paul Abbott – FLOOD (Clutag Press, 2008)
Announcing the forthcoming publication of FLOOD by Paul Abbott with illustrations by Gail McNeillie, available February 2008 Limited edition of 100 copies. 22pp 170mm x 240mm ISBN 0-9553476-2-9 Paul Abbott’s poem FLOOD is a ‘Waste Land’ for the twenty-first century, a timely and daring debut in the disaster genre, by a twenty-one-year-old in his final year at Oxford. Those who have read the first issue of Clutag’s magazine ARCHIPELAGO will have enjoyed a snapshot of the poem in its pages. Now it is offered complete in ten sections, illustrated with eight superbly grainy drawings by Gail McNeillie. The vision here – ‘an Epic Newsflash’ – is one of post-apocalyptic catastrophe ‘couched,’ we’re told in a prefatory note ‘somewhat in the film-cutting…
ARCHIPELAGO Issue One
Announcing the forthcoming publication of ARCHIPELAGO Issue One, available Summer 2007 ARCHIPELAGO is to be a literary magazine in the ordinary sense, in that it will contain writings in non-fictional prose, and verse. Extraordinary will be its preoccupations with landscape, with documentary and remembrance, with wilderness and wet, with natural and cultural histories, with language and languages, with the littoral and vestigial, the geological, and topographical, with climates, in terms of both meteorology, ecology and environment; and all these things as metaphor, liminal and subliminal, at the margins, in the unnameable constellation of islands on the Eastern Atlantic coast, known variously in other millennia as Britain, Great Britain, Britain and Ireland etc; even, too, too readily, the United Kingdom (including…
Tom Paulin – The Camouflage School (Clutag Press, 2007)
Announcing the forthcoming publication of The Camouflage School by Tom Paulin, available Spring/Summer 2007 Limited edition of 250 copies. 36pp 170mm x 240mm ISBN 0-9553476-0-2 The five poems in this important collection – ‘Sidney Philip’ (a poem about Philip Larkin, his father and the war), ‘Battle of the Atlantic’, ‘My Name is Edward Wadsworth’, ‘Convoy to Archangel’, ‘Noor Inayat Khan (S.O.E. Dachau)’ – are all published here for the first time. They show Tom Paulin writing as movingly, passionately, and inventively as ever he has written before. Part of his continuing ‘loose-leaf’ epic of the Second World War, begun in 2002 with The Invasion Handbook, these poems bear unflinching, compassionate witness to the tragedy of war, and in particular the special…