The Meanwhile Sites

What is a city for? How long do the vibrations persist from an economic shock wave, or a guitar chord? Is anything really permanent? The ‘meanwhile site’ is a place where change becomes a design feature, and Pete Green’s remarkable debut collection commemorates the transient and the marginal – from the emergency housing made of shipping containers to crumbling coastal paths and sea stacks; from the villages left isolated by railway closures to the predicament of the new generations disenfranchised by the march of neoliberalism. With the temporary comes hope of renewal, though, and alternatives to a disrupted, rootless culture might emerge in a Neolithic stone circle, or a circle of friends. Keenly observed, deft and humane, these are poems for our age of precarity.

“Pete Green’s poems dislike fences and I love them for that. They are feral, elegant, beautifully observed. I recommend following where they lead you.” – Helen Mort

“I loved these poems. Each one engages with the real world, its ugliness, its beauty, its horror, in a new and fascinating way; each one represents a different way of glimpsing the world. They are all politically and philosophically ambitious and formally innovative. A wonderful collection.” – Jonathan Taylor

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Hemisphere

Hemisphere is the story of an impossible journey, told in verse, which circumnavigates the politics of interaction between people, places and poetry. On a chaotic round trip from the Hebrides across the north Atlantic, Canada, Alaska and Siberia, the poem invites reflection on government and nationality, geography, language and ‘post-truth’, fertility, decay, and imagination.

Hemisphere is published as a 48-page perfect-bound short book by Longbarrow Press (October 2021).

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Sheffield Almanac

A poem in four chapters about rivers, rain, relocation and regeneration, exploring the industrial past and post-industrial future of Pete Green’s adopted home city.

Sheffield Almanac is a 36-page pamphlet published by Longbarrow Press (May 2017).

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See also: Model City, Pete’s essay for the Longbarrow blog about Sheffield’s civic identity and the implications of being a ‘city of making’

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Anthologies

Brotherton Poetry Prize Anthology

Eight of Pete’s poems feature in this collection of work by the five poets shortlisted for the 2019 Brotherton Poetry Prize, published in March 2020 by Carcanet.
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Pulp

Pete’s poem sequence Pulp reflects on disposability and renewal in response to Sheffield’s recent tree fellings and library closures. It appears in The Meanwhile Sites but was first published in October 2019 in DW Cities: Sheffield, an anthology from Dostoyevsky Wannabe.
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