Long Field Loop by Rebecca Sharp

Description

When so much of moving forward includes looking back, the poems in Long Field Loop make space for making amends – a space where land, humans and more-than-humans explore patterns of experience in times of reckoning.

The title sequence looks at a decade (2014–24) of personal and political upheaval through a Scottish lens, a recalibration of hopes and dreams. Set within the wider context of late-stage capitalism, seismic global unrest and climate crisis, Rebecca Sharp’s poems consider how we find our feet again, the recovery of values and voice, what we must lay to rest and how we carry on.

Rebecca Sharp is a poet, playwright and interdisciplinary artist from Glasgow, now based in Fife. Her pamphlet Rough Currency (Tapsalteerie 2021) explores the poetics of oil and the imagination, receiving an RSL Literature Matters Award and an Art of Energy Award. Interdisciplinary collaborations have been shortlisted for the Brush & Lyre Prize for Multimedia Poetry and the Scottish Landscape Awards. In 2022-24 she was the inaugural Artist in Residence with the Centre for Energy Ethics, supported by CEE and Creative Scotland; during which time she researched and wrote Long Field Loop. See more at: www.rebeccajoysharp.com

“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.” – Amanda Yates Garcia

“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.” – John Glenday

“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. The collection is poised with intent, culminating in a scliff spell. This is an archipelago to dislodge expectation, whose frequencies of ice floe and peat creak in the inner ear of disaster. It is also an offering to beleaguered hope.” – MacGillivray

“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.” – Samuel Tongue