Poems About Borders

Abstract

In 2022, I was commissioned to write poems that explored the deep history of the English county of Gloucestershire, as seen through the lens of the pre-history gallery of Corinium Museum at Cirencester. This gallery is one small room in what is otherwise a museum given over almost entirely to the county’s history of Roman occupation, but I became quickly entranced by the fluidity of borders from the Neolithic period to the late Iron Age and with the multitude of methods the migratory peoples of pre-history used to mark where they had been or where they might stay, be it riverways or cairns, flattened mud desire lines that evolved into roads, or symbols on coins that mutated as they travelled across Europe to suit the tribes that used them. The pre-history gallery may be small, but under its surfaces, deep in the soil and stone, arrow-head and bone of history, I was delighted to discover traces of, and hints at, the fossilised map of thought that led disparate peoples to fix upon immutable (but still imaginary) borders. For more information, visit https://www.adamhorovitz.co.uk/.