The Debris Field

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 multimedia 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.