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 some especially resonant sea areas: Malin, Hebrides, Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Humber . . .
Once again ARCHIPELAGO offers important new work by some of our leading writers and artists, with a brilliant mix of newcomers, and others less well-known. And of the party are: Norman Ackroyd, Julian Bell, George Chamier, Tim Dee, Greg Delanty, Douglas Dunn, Terry Eagleton, Seamus Heaney, Mick Imlah, Angela Leighton, Angus Macmillan, Andrew McNeillie, Gail McNeillie, Alexander Moffat, Bernard O’Donoghue, Sheila Pehrson, Jem Poster, Alan Riach, Rod Richard, Fiona Stafford, David Wheatley.
To speak geographically, issue 2 ranges from Donegal, Derry and Antrim to Scotland, via Galloway, Skye and Cromarty, to descend into England at Filey Brigg. It delays a few days to explore the Wash (neither sea nor land), then puts out again to round the Norfolk and Suffolk coasts. As it progresses it turns the archipelago this way and that, celebrating it across a host of literary, artistic, linguistic, historic, political and topographical trajectories and perspectives.
At more than 140 pages this expanded ARCHIPELAGO remains the best of bargains: £10.00 (including p&p for UK and Ireland), plus £5.00 p&p (rest of the world). Orders will be supplied strictly on a first come first served basis as soon as copies are available.
The Editor: Andrew McNeillie, 16 March 2008
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