Long Field Loop launched at the end of May 2024 at the Byre Theatre in St Andrews (and online). There will also be ePub and audio versions of the collection available in due course, with Tapsalteerie.

Since the collection launched in May, I have also launched into a series of reading events which continue through the rest of 2024 (and possibly beyond…). You can find these listed on my website – highlights include reading in Gdańsk in June, Crail Festival in July, Edinburgh International Book Festival in August, and a workshop for the Geological Society of London in September (offered again at Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh in October).

The collection explores energy futures, anthropogenic climate change, energy ethics, and some of the deeper emotional, mythological and imaginative entanglements. The residency presented a crucial period of focus for me to research and write the new collection, forging new and ongoing connections with researchers across a wide range of disciplines. The residency project also included a number of associated engagements across the 18-months: creative writing workshops, talks, presentations and curated events; online and in-person.

Several new collaborations were fostered as a result of the residency. These included my work with Dr Monika Szuba (University of Gdańsk, and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society), to co-write a new text (I offer you a needle) presented at StAnza poetry festival in March 2024 (St Andrews). I subsequently visited Gdańsk in June, shortly after the collection was published – to read from Long Field Loop at the Instytut Kultury Miejskiej and the University of Gdańsk, supported by Publishing Scotland / Scottish Books International and the University of Gdańsk.

My poem ‘Peatland’ (also from the new collection) is featured on the website of Peatland Restoration: A Guide for Crofting Communities; co-created and spearheaded by CEE Affiliate researchers Drs Cornelia Helmcke and Lydia Cole.

Thanks

The launch event also marked the close of my time as Artist-in-Residence with the Centre for Energy Ethics. With thanks to Creative Scotland, the CEE, and Duncan Lockerbie of Tapsalteerie for supporting the project. Thanks to CEE Director Mette High, James Crooks and Paul Conlan. Thanks also to collaborators Cornelia Helmcke and Lydia Cole; Monika Szuba (University of Gdańsk – I offer you a needle); Elodie Laügt (Centre for Poetic Innovation, University of St Andrews – Good Till The Close; I offer you a needle); Pauline Souleau (School of Modern Languages, St Andrews – Our Ludic Augury / Games Night); Steve Smart (trailer film and Velella velella); Alex South (musician – trailer film, Velella velella and Comma of Didymus); Emily Lord-Kambitsch and Bowen Walker, Andy Jackson, and Amanda Yates Garcia for Our Ludic Augury / Games Night.

What’s next

In the summer I began work on a new project funded by Creative Scotland, with partnership from Historic Environment Scotland – researching and writing a performance due to take place at Culross Abbey in Fife and Glasgow Cathedral in 2025 (plus publication). Much to do before then! Keep an eye on my website for updates. In autumn 2024 I’m teaching the module Writing the Environment at University of Dundee. My own interdisciplinary writing group continues at Off the Rails Arthouse in Fife, which I teach throughout the year (usually fully subscribed but enquire if you’re interested). You can keep in touch via [email protected]

Some responses to the collection:


John Glenday, poet:

“Long Field Loop is an extraordinary, utterly unique collection, exploring the faultline between science and poetry, and proving, in doing so, that science in the right hands can be a form of song. This intelligent, resourceful book is an antidote to the Anthropocene – hugely informative, hugely readable, written to remind us of the beauty and fragility of our relationship with the natural world.”

MacGillivray, poet:

“Long Field Loop is a disrupted locus of somatosensory cartographics, geographic awareness and a telegraphic topography beating across landscapes of conscience and the ‘bite-marks’ of time. Loops and reverse loops spool, punctuated by relentless rhetorical iterations and re-iterations: a Greek chorus of calumny and the sciences. This is an archipelago to dislodge expectation, whose frequencies of ice floe and peat creak in the inner ear of disaster, also an offering to beleaguered hope.” 

Amanda Yates Garcia, author of Initiated: Memoir of a Witch, host of the Between the Worlds podcast:

“Benefica. Medicinal magic. This is what we experience as we enter Rebecca Sharp’s Long Field Loop. A work so kitchen table intimate that, reading it, we feel intimately connected, warming our cold edges among a circle of friends that includes humans, geodes, birch trees, otters, and peat. Sharp’s is the warmest kind of magic. Long Field Loop is more than a book, it’s an invitation to a party. Beyond the river and through the canyon together we enter a circle of pine. When the morning comes, and we return home, Sharp presses into our hands a party favor, a warding charm, a sacred reminder, we depart from this book knowing, as she says so insistently, we still want to be here.”

Samuel Tongue, poet:

“Long Field Loop is a cosmos channelled through the rhizomatic structure of everything everywhere all at once. Intimate and expansive, inventive, expressive, this is poetry as a (re)search for meaning and honest implication; and the reader is folded directly into its eco-poiesis. Financial futures and pine needles, tapirs, blanket bog, sea otters, and prehistoric star-gazing parties; Sharp animates the academic with vibrant interconnection and offers new patterns of thought and practice across any imagined divide. Velella velella have never sounded (or looked) so bright.”

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