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…
Tag: News
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.
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…
Ian Niall: Part of his Life
Announcing the forthcoming publication of Ian Niall: Part of his Life by Andrew McNeillie, available March 2007 ‘…We owe Andrew McNeillie a great debt for reintroducing us to the most neglected of writers.’ Douglas Gifford Ian Niall was the pen name of John McNeillie (1916-2002). Between them they wrote more than forty books, over a period of as many years, from 1939 when at twenty-two John McNeillie published Wigtown Ploughman: Part of His Life, with Putnam of London and New York, a Scottish classic still in print, a book that raised a national controversy, leading to housing reform. As Ian Niall, author of the novel No Resting Place (1948), filmed in Ireland by Paul Rotha, he would go on to…
Geoffrey Hill – Poetry Reading at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford
Announcing Geoffrey Hill’s forthcoming poetry reading event at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford. Details are as follows: GEOFFREY HILL: POETRY READING AT THE SHELDONIAN Poems from FOR THE UNFALLEN (1959) to WITHOUT TITLE (2006) 7pm for 7.30-10.00pm 1st February 2006 Admission Free. Sponsored byOUP Copies of A Treatise of Civil Power by Geoffrey Hill, published by Clutag Press (2005), will be available for sale at the event. [wpsc_products product_id=’630′] [wpsc_products product_id=’646′]
TLS Review, 19th November 2004
John McNeillie My Childhood pp148. Thame: Clutag. £20. 0954727509 John McNeillie is better known as Ian Niall, under which pen name he became a major figure in British nature writing of the twentieth century. A Scotsman who ended up living in North Wales, McNeillie wrote more than forty books, mostly on rural themes. He was, notes his son (the poet Andrew McNeillie) in the introduction to My Childhood, “a kind of lyric poet in prose, and an elegist who had known Eden”. That Eden was North Clutag Farm, a remote steading in Wigtownshire in the Scottish borders, where McNeillie grew up under the care of his grandparents in the late 1910s and 20s. It is these years that are the…
My Childhood Book Launch
My Childhood, John McNeillie’s previously unpublished account of his childhood and youth-time at North Clutag farm, will be launched at the Wigtown Booktown Sixth Annual Literary Festival on Saturday 25th September 2004. Andrew McNeillie will be talking about the book and selling copies at the Festival. [wpsc_products product_id=’546′]