This collection of poems by Adam Horovitz was inspired by the Neolithic and Bronze Age archaeology of the Cotswolds exhibited at the Corinium museum, Cirencester, and the prehistoric and Roman artefacts from the Roman bathing and temple complex and Sacred Spring in Bath. It marks the culmination of two creative projects that involved an artistic collaboration with musician Chris Cundy, and filmmaker Dominyka Cincaite, and is divided into two sections, Old Roads, and Water, Prayer.

The collection’s title poem examines how stone itself can be seen as a migrant:

 

     Stone travelled far, as all technology must.

     Swarmed to places where the need for flint

     and obsidian was great. People traded trust;

     stone just journeyed. Fell and left its print.

                                              (‘Slow Migration’)

 

Flint knapping was the shaping of flint and similar stones like obsidian by striking them to create sharp-edged tools for hunting, butchering, and crafting shapes like arrowheads, hand axes, and knives. Horovitz marvels at the “revealed histories” in ‘An Axe Head from the River’:

 

     It’s flint. An axe. Carved in such a way

     as to suggest, say, 40,000 years

     have passed since someone knapped it sharp,

     cut antlers from deer, chopped branches

     for the fire, fought wolves or other men.

 

There are the skeletal remains found in a long barrow:

 

     Articulated in death as he was in life

     his positioning speaks of unpicked

     codes laid at knowledge’s border,

     boundaries of belief. He is a way-marker

     for ways forgotten and unknown.

                                    (‘The Flint Knapper’)

 

The word ‘border’ keeps cropping up. Horovitz describes coinage as “a border stamped with a king’s face” (‘An Early History of Money’). Another poem, ‘Horse / Power’ refers to white horses appearing on the landscapes of hills, “carved / on the horizon / as guide and totem … Way-marker for the well-worn / track connecting tribes.”

In the second section, Water, Prayer, the opening poem ‘Roadside Manifestos’ imagines refugees “in uncertain / weathers escaping ravaged lands”:

 

     We came this way following the river,

     the setting sun. Left war behind us,

     fled the warriors and their frenzy.

     Came looking for a life. Walked across

     waters and lands we barely understood.

 

If only it was still that simple, if it really was back then.

‘The Sacred Spring at Dawn’, a sensual poem about the Aquae Sulis in Bath, observes

 

     sulphurous globes

     that catch the morning

     unawares. A shiver-

     scent of centuries adrift

     in the city’s heart.

 

It’s a poem that invites and helps you to sniff “the aroma of history submerged”.

Horovitz insists that a city "is not its buildings. / It is its people and waters." In a succession of poems he celebrates the steam of Bath's Roman baths, the offerings laid "at the hot mouth of the spring ... the rituals carvings in metal tablets".  

In his final poem he admits and concludes: "All this is guesswork. We glean / what we can, imagine more." And certainly, the gleaning and imagining of these poems is a great part of their appeal.   

The growing popularity of the past in the form of archaeology is celebrated these days in a number of TV programmes about teams uncovering the peoples that came before us, and artefacts that offer clues about them. Although there is a wealth of detail within these poems, I would have welcomed some notes at the end of the collection to help the reader dig down further, and amass even more knowledge.

Nevertheless this is an enjoyably crafted and thought-provoking collection that repays further investigation, as all the best archaeological sites do. In these days of whipped-up hysteria about present-day migrations, Adam Horovitz’s poems, described as an “exploration of the West of England before it was English”, do not carry an overt message. But their implication is unmistakable:

 

     What is needed of myth is truth

     and, out of truth, fact.

                   (‘A Place in the River’)

 

 

Adam Horovitz, Slow Migrations, Indigo Dreams, £10