Description
You will now listen to my voice.My voice will guide you and help you
to go deeper into the debris field…
RMS Titanic was the largest and most opulent passenger steamship in the world. Four days into her maiden crossing of the Atlantic, on 14 April 1912, she struck an iceberg and sank with huge loss of life.
The Debris Field began as a multi-media poetry production devised, written and performed by Chris McCabe, Simon Barraclough and Isobel Dixon. It explores aspects of the ship’s extraordinary story, drawing on the decades of cultural debris accumulated around the story of the tragic ship – from its construction to its sinking, from the immensity of the cosmos to the tiny bacteria now devouring the wreck. In performance, the poets’ words are fused with sound and image, accompanied by music composed by Oli Barrett and film by Jack Wake-Walker.
The book edition contains the complete text of this highly seductive collaborative poem, with its subtly shifting moods, its multiple haunted voices and deftly deployed collages, in an edition which emulates the look and feel of a drowned book, recently recovered.
…we knew
as we looked back for the final time
– our emptiness fluted by the wind of the beach –
– our first memories expiring into the blue –
– a cot, a curtain, a rail of stars –
we knew by the lights in the mouths of our lovers
that everything had changed forever
“The Debris Field somehow makes its way through the Titanic ice-field, avoiding cliché.”
– Fiona Moore, Displacement
- The Debris Field on Tumblr
- Reviewed at Sabotage Reviews by David Clarke
- Review by Fiona Moore
About the Authors
Simon Barraclough is the author of Los Alamos Mon Amour (Salt, 2008), Bonjour Tetris (Penned in the Margins, 2010) and Neptune Blue (Salt, 2011). He is the editor of Psycho Poetica (Sidekick Books, 2012). Los Alamos Mon Amour was shortlisted for the Forward Best First Collection Prize in 2008.
Isobel Dixon is the author of Weather Eye (Carapace, 2001), A Fold in the Map (Salt, 2007) and The Tempest Prognosticator (Salt, 2011). Her work is featured in Birdbook: Towns, Parks, Gardens & Woodland and Psycho Poetica (both Sidekick Books), Penguin’s Poems for Love and The Best British Poetry 2011 (Salt, 2011).
Chris McCabe is the author of The Hutton Inquiry (Salt, 2005), Zeppelins (Salt, 2008) and THE RESTRUCTURE (Salt, 2012). His play Shad Thames, Broken Wharf was performed at the London Word Festival in 2010 and published by Penned in the Margins. He has recorded his work for The Poetry Archive.
