Pete Green, "Hemisphere"

Pete Green is a poet and musician who writes about place and identity, finitude, coastlines, cities and landscape change, trains, birds, and sleeping on someone's floor after playing a gig in another city. Their new short book Hemisphere and pamphlet Sheffield Almanac are published by Longbarrow Press, and their poetry has also appeared (or is scheduled to) in Under the Radar, the Fenland Poetry Journal, Stand, Anthropocene and elsewhere. Pete was longlisted in the 2020 National Poetry Competition and shortlisted for the 2019 Brotherton Poetry Prize. They live in Sheffield on the side of a very steep hill. Visit Pete's website at petegreensolo.com and follow @petenothing on social.

About Hemisphere, by Pete Green

Hemisphere is a long poem in a short book, telling the story of a circular voyage which proceeds from the Hebrides around the north Atlantic, Alaska and Siberia, then finally back to Europe. Along the way the protagonist visits a doomsday seed vault, a giant qwerty keyboard, a boundary between Tuesday and Wednesday, the world's largest island on a lake on an island on a lake on an island, two pubs and an Arctic coffee bar. 

These are all real locations on an impossible journey. Ultimately Hemisphere is a sort of meta-travel narrative which poses questions about who has permission to practise place writing, and explores the power of imagination to push back against our ongoing personal lockdowns. 

You can read more about Hemisphere on the publisher's website here. You can watch a short trailer for the book here:

Below, you can read an excerpt from the book.

From Hemisphere

Vladivostok

43°06’43”N 131°52’55”E

Was it a crash or a signal failure? Was it

the whim of some fastidious ambassador

that bore you here? Was it that metallic

clang, unexplained, that rang out between

the islands at the Bering Strait’s midpoint

like the song of a valley floor steelworks?

A deleted vault at the radar’s perimeter

fence? Whatever. Your hand is returning

to your jacket’s inside pocket, where your

ticket radiates assurance. Steel blue-clad

officials have already trooped the length

of your carriage several times; their gaze

interrogates the space you occupy, as if

you are not there. Across the aisle, though,

a woman’s complexion is fresh snowfall;

her eyes are feline, opalescent, much like

Kate’s, and they watch you checking out

the space. Your seeming aplomb prevails.

Your research’s thoroughness outweighs

all the Transsiberian-based thrillers where

naïve westerners are doomed to succumb

to menace or the mere threat of menace,

but you were caught out by the railways’

adherence nationwide to Moscow time

which, at this longitude, gave seven hours

to contemplate the famous hipped roof

of the station, the massive red characters

of its Владивосток sign, their unwieldy

ornateness, the earthenware flagstones

brought from Japan, painstaking mosaics

of berries, fruit and horsemen – all of it

biography of Russia, layered narratives of

regimes, of reinventions and revisionisms,

the wool that’s tugged down over eyes,

the emollient layers of pearl that cancel

disagreeable grains. You know the power

of opalescent eyes, of vodka, of people’s

own readiness to swallow what is served.

For you the cracks appeared back when

the bankers tanked the whole shebang

and chancellors and governors discreetly

summoned bailout billions from the ether

with mouse clicks and commands while

the clinic closed its doors on you during

that fragile first trimester. The ticket man

comes through from the first-class coach;

with him the notion of an upgrade, using

a little quantitative easing of your own.

You imagine requesting the kitten-eyed

woman to join you, knowing full well

that for better or for worse you will do

no such thing – and that’s one more life

thrown under one more cancelled train

of thought. So was it a crash or a failed

signal? Was it one more hardware glitch?

Your vigilance will bear you on through

Khabarovsk, Irkutsk, the room’s perishing

cold account for Omsk, Novosibirsk, and

the frustrated force of all your bloody-

mindedness can see you through the rest.

Chris Jones, "Little Piece of Harm"

By Chris Jones

I grew up in Quorn, Leicestershire. I’ve lived in Sheffield since 1990. I came to the city to do a PhD on the poetry of Thom Gunn. I was given an Eric Gregory Award for my poetry in 1996. From 1997 to 1999, I worked as a writer-in-residence at Nottingham Prison. I was the Literature Officer for Leicestershire for five years and then spent some time as a freelance writer and poetry festival organiser. I’ve spent the last fourteen years teaching Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University (my staff profile page is here).

In 2007 I published my first full-length collection, The Safe House, with Shoestring Press. I have since published a number of pamphlets and full-length collections, including Jigs and Reels (Shoestring Press, 2013), Skin – which came out in 2015 and is still available from Longbarrow Press – and the sequence which I have just published with Longbarrow Press: Little Piece of Harm (2021).

About Little Piece of Harm

Little Piece of Harm is a narrative sequence that focuses on 24 hours in the life of a city that has been shut down in the aftermath of a shooting. As this act of violence ramifies outwards, the sequence explores the geographical reach of Sheffield – its urban settings and its rural landmarks – and eavesdrops on the city’s conversations. Pete, our narrator, comes into contact with a range of people who reflect on this public killing in relation to private moments of trauma and harm. Subsequently we learn that Pete has his own burdens he is coming to terms with, as day bleeds into night.

You can read three blog pieces that I wrote about the evolution of the sequence here, here and here. Below, you can read a sample poem from the collection.

From Little Piece of Harm

Blue Abandoned Van

Rhyme all the ways a city battens down.
Say, river waters tide the roads to town.

Power's stripped from mainframes, circuits, wires.
Crowds look on: a business district dies.

Blizzard. The largest snowfall in decades.
Squares are clad as monuments to trades.

Or here, high summer, sometime afternoon,
a man steps back from a black saloon

and takes in Sheffield's stinging diesel haze
as traffic smokes and throttles, stalls, blockades.

He hoofs across four lanes of idling cars
to ditch his echo under Wicker Arch.

Skims his shadow off weed-encrusted brick
the curry houses, pubs no longer public

over the lights, where the quick or alert
might glimpse a strap, some shade beneath his shirt

though his image clears the shopfront glass
before observers get to alter the facts;

he's made the bridge and marked the policeman
who edges round a blue abandoned van.

He slows to wrest this load from off his chest:
pics will later show a pistol's heft

rolled a quarter turn in gangster style
(here's blurry footage caught on someone's mobile).

He’s metres away, lugging freighted breath,
the palest citrus fragrance thinned with sweat;

hails the copper now as though in greeting
as if his palm might cup an ear, a cheek.

A shot to start the gawkers, one in the mouth
and through this opened face a voice pours out.