Author: andrew

Pre-publication announcement for ARCHIPELAGO Issue Five, available Winter 2010-2011

The next issue of ARCHIPELAGO is currently in the final stages of preparation. Among the contributions so far accumulated are: Tim Dee on ‘Nature Writing’, James Macdonald Lockhart on ‘The Flow Country’ of West Caithness, John Kerrigan on ‘Archipelagic Oz’, Caspar Henderson on Norfolk’s ‘Scolt Head Island’, John Greening with a literary history of Huntingdonshire, a ‘Ghosts’ feature on Seton Gordon (1886-1977) with a plethora of black-and-white photographs, returning us to St Kilda in 1928. There are new poems by Meg Bateman, Douglas Dunn, Michael Longley, Les Murray, among others, and engravings by Norman Ackroyd.

Clutag Press is accepting pre-orders for Issue Five. Orders placed prior to the publication date will be despatched on a first come, first served basis as soon as copies are available.

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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 high seas of luck and serendipity, to please you in your passions, your islomania especially.

Issue 4 more than maintains the standard set. Among those landed this time: Norman Ackroyd (and some fourteen images, ten devoted to St Kilda), Ronald Blythe (‘Family Circles’), John Burnside (‘Amnesia’), Douglas Dunn (‘Instructions to a Saintly Poet’), Robert Macfarlane (on Eric Ravilious), Robin Robertson (a long poem on ‘Leaving St Kilda’) with much more besides, including work by new young writers on: Jura, and Cornwall; and in Gaelic (St Kildan dialect) with en face translation.

Please place your orders early, and remember: ARCHIPELAGO makes an excellent solution to the Xmas gift problem. What’s more, at £10.00, including P&P for Britain and Ireland (£15.00 elsewhere), it’s a bargain without equal.

ARCHIPELAGO 4 will be launched on 26 November 2009 by Robert Macfarlane at the University of Exeter’s campus in Cornwall, as part of Exeter University’s ‘Writing, Nature and Place’ MA. It will be re-launched on 4 December in Convocation House, Bodleian Library, Oxford – with readings and contributions from, among others: Norman Ackroyd, Ronald Blythe, Tim Dee, Douglas Dunn, Robert Macfarlane and Robin Roberston. Philip Lancaster will read work by Ivor Gurney and sing from Gurney’s repertoire too. Douglas Dunn will conclude the occasion with a wider reading from his work. Dates for your diaries.

The Editor: Andrew McNeillie,   21 October 2009

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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 offer celebratory interactions with landscape and nature, history and remembrance, by both writers and visual artists, including: Norman Ackroyd, Niamh Clancy, Tim Dee, Ivor Gurney (represented by five hitherto unpublished works), Michael Longley, Peter McDonald, Robert Macfarlane, Osip Mandelshtam, John Montague, Les Murray, David Nash, Bernard O’Donoghue, Heather O’Donoghue, Patrick Parrinder.

‘Praise God for Poetry – it is a good thing and fills up spaces in landscape and life with human interest and memory,’ wrote Ivor Gurney. Praise what or whomsoever you will. Ishmael speaks of ‘the great flood-gates of the wonder-world’. This issue’s ‘wonder-world’ reaches from Shetland in the Northern Hemisphere as far as the Southern Seas, to the biggest island of them all, as figured in the work of Les Murray. Once again the defiant lyric voice is heard in our pages, and it speaks volumes more than its proportions suggest, like the wren or the Shetland blackbird, as described in Tim Dee’s brilliant midnight rhapsody ‘Darkless Night’.

At more than 114 pages this third ARCHIPELAGO remains the best of bargains: £10.00 (including p&p for UK and Ireland), plus £5.00 p&p (rest of the world).

The Editor: Andrew McNeillie,   3 February 2009

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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 some especially resonant sea areas: Malin, Hebrides, Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Humber . . .

Once again ARCHIPELAGO offers important new work by some of our leading writers and artists, with a brilliant mix of newcomers, and others less well-known. And of the party are: Norman Ackroyd, Julian Bell, George Chamier, Tim Dee, Greg Delanty, Douglas Dunn, Terry Eagleton, Seamus Heaney, Mick Imlah, Angela Leighton, Angus Macmillan, Andrew McNeillie, Gail McNeillie, Alexander Moffat, Bernard O’Donoghue, Sheila Pehrson, Jem Poster, Alan Riach, Rod Richard, Fiona Stafford, David Wheatley.

To speak geographically, issue 2 ranges from Donegal, Derry and Antrim to Scotland, via Galloway, Skye and Cromarty, to descend into England at Filey Brigg. It delays a few days to explore the Wash (neither sea nor land), then puts out again to round the Norfolk and Suffolk coasts. As it progresses it turns the archipelago this way and that, celebrating it across a host of literary, artistic, linguistic, historic, political and topographical trajectories and perspectives.

At more than 140 pages this expanded ARCHIPELAGO remains the best of bargains: £10.00 (including p&p for UK and Ireland), plus £5.00 p&p (rest of the world).  Orders will be supplied strictly on a first come first served basis as soon as copies are available.

The Editor: Andrew McNeillie,   16 March 2008

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