Brian Lewis on his memoir 'Last Collection' alongside Chris Jones on his book of poems Little Piece of Harm

Here, in the first of two episodes, I take a slightly different approach and talk to Brian Lewis about his essay/memoir ‘Last Collection’ alongside my own book of poetry Little Piece of Harm.

On Friday 26th March 2021 Brian set off on a ‘round’ of Sheffield to deliver copies of my recently published poetry book Little Piece of Harm (Longbarrow Press). He went on to write about this journey, a meditation on city, place, home and art itself in his extended essay/memoir ‘Last Collection’. In our conversation we explore connections between the two pieces of writing - both of which focus on traversing the city of Sheffield in ‘stressed’ times.

Firstly, I talk to Brian about his duel role of being both a publisher and a writer, and about how one discipline feeds into the other.  Brian reflects on walking as a way of making sense of the city.  We examine how each walk taken engenders renewed iterations of Sheffield - we are constantly remaking the city through the act of observing the place. Also, Sheffield is reinventing itself - conceptually and physically, through demolishing older structures and planning new builds, new developments.  

We touch on Brian’s series of ‘Lockdown Walks’ before concentrating on ‘Last Collection’ for the rest of the podcast. Brian ruminates on the idea of slowness as a philosophical approach.  We talk at some length about Lockdown as one response to the COVID epidemic, which leads me to talk about my time in Aldeburgh in the summer of 2020 when I was finishing Little Piece of Harm.  Brian goes on to detail how he made notes while following his delivery route on the 26th March - and then how he ‘recalled’ and built up the particulars that are layered through ‘Last Collection’.  I relate how I built up Little Piece of Harm as a ‘portrait’ of a city. I begin to pick out and focus on a number of the abiding themes in the sequence.  Then Brian examines the notion of 'form', mixing (or not mixing) prose and poetry in 'Last Collection'.  We reflect on 'the rhythms and refrains' in our writing that captures the essence of walking - and at the end of the first 'chapter' of this podcast, Brian introduces and reads from a section of 'Last Collection' itself.

You can find a full account of Brian’s 'Lockdown Walks' here. 

You can find extracts from ‘Last Collection’ on the Longbarrow website here: ‘One-Way Mirror’  and ‘Last Collection’ .

This is the section from ‘Last Collection’ that Brian reads on the podcast itself:

From ‘Last Collection’ (in Local Distribution)

The shutters are down on Highfield Post Office. It's a straight left to Andy's house from here, Woodhead Road to Cherry Street, the hard drives stacked in the flooded cellar. Andy was a poet of the city and then its photographer. The switch seemed to happen overnight. It was unexpected but it made sense. The images were striking and inventive and they accumulated quickly, they were fresh with possibility, they captured the city in its moments of transition and looked beyond those moments. There were landscapes without land and portraits without faces. Colour studies and achromatic grids. Found abstractions and literal objects. There was craft in the titling of the photosets, a lightness of touch, Rising River, Island Songs, Test Patterns. I looked forward to each new series. Then it all just went. He abandoned one account and then another. Dead links. The internet hadn't saved any of it. This was intentional. There was no sense in arguing with him. It was no longer what he meant or felt. The work he has made since then is still in the world, or some of it is, you could say that it equals or exceeds the earlier work, it is hard to know, the earlier work has gone, and the city of which it was part has gone, why make comparisons, this is the difference between us, the letting go. I remember descending a stone flight to the cellar at Cherry Street and taking the first few steps in an inch or two of water, the electricity had gone off, again, rolling debts and standing charges burning through the top-ups, the credit and the emergency credit. The batteries in my torch were dead, the terminals corroded. I lit my way with a lighter that I had found in the kitchen, four or five seconds before the flame brushed the tip of my thumb, then four or five seconds of darkness. After a few attempts I managed to turn the top-up card the right side up and the right way round and feed it into the slot of the meter. The cellar light came on, a flickering strip, it showed cobwebs, cracked walls, and a freestanding metal rack with two or three desktop computers veiled in dust. I wondered how much work had died in those machines and then I remembered that it was none of my business, that I was not his archivist. I was still his editor, a handful of last poems yet to be published, his night walks, his laments. The poems come back to me now, as I pass the closed doors of the Highfield Branch Library, what were they getting at, the fables and parables, what are they saying, just before they break, things that can only be shown or spoken of in lamplight, a life recovered in the moment of its telling, a city caught in the act of disappearing.

 

I’ll give more details about Little Piece of Harm in the second episode - though here is a link to information about the book on the Longbarrow website.

 

Brian Lewis is the editor and publisher of Longbarrow Press, a Sheffield-based collective whose activities include interdisciplinary collaborations and poetry walks. His publications include East Wind (Gordian Projects, 2016), an account of a walk across the Holderness peninsula, and White Thorns (Gordian Projects, 2017), based on a series of walks through the Isle of Axholme. A full-length book, Local Distribution, is in preparation.

You can follow me on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes. You can find out more about my own writing through my website - chris-jones.org.uk - or on my Substack Swift Diaries.

The end music was composed and played by William Jones.