Untold Stories: Poetry at English Heritage

Introduction
jacob sam-la rose
Any creative endeavour typically
shares something with the structure of an
iceberg. You know the age-old allusion:
faced with the part of the iceberg that
rises above sea level, we all too often
ignore its submarinal bulk, the larger
part that remains beyond view. It’s been
a long road from the initial conversations
I had at the end of 2019 with Dominique
Bouchard, Head of Learning and
Interpretation, about an English Heritage
poetry residency. We spoke about digging
deep into what Englishness has been
and is becoming, and (with a nod to the
submarinal mass I just mentioned) an
effort to reach towards the unheard and
unseen, those voices and narratives that
are an irrefutable part of English history
but have remained below a threshold of
visibility or broad acknowledgement.
As we returned to planning later
in 2020 and considered how to move
forward in spite of the uncertainty of a
pandemic, the vision for the programme
evolved, and we engaged with the realities
of making it happen. There were the
practical challenges that arose from trying
to do justice to research and writing in
response to English Heritage sites without
the physical access we would have had at
any other time. Beyond those practicalities
lay other, more nuanced considerations:
the increased sense of weight for those
poets confronting painful narratives at
the intersection of English and Black
history as Black writers, at a time in
which institutional racism, brutality and
questions around the relative value of
human life were once again foregrounded
as present, lived experience. Suffice to say,
much of the work these poems depend
on isn’t visible on these pages and yet
deserves to be acknowledged.
There is a wealth of poetry and
perspective gathered in this anthology,
traversing history and heritage, pitching
back through time while interrogating and
even refuting reverberations of the past
within a living present. These collected
works speak beyond the pages on which
they are positioned. And there’s always
more that can be said.
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