Jay Bernard’s powerful and award-winning 2019 poetry collection, Surge, grapples with the loss of black life. The collection starts by looking over historical scars – “remember we were brought here from the clear waters of our dreams, that we might be named, numbered and forgotten” – but soon the pages are charred and bloody with the presence of new death. The horrors of the night where “flames dem ah fly” are imagined with both tenderness and frankness. These poems often speak in the voice of the New Cross party attendees. Its strong sense of place, its patois, its demand for justice, its curiosity (“Will anybody speak of this?”) are reminders that four decades on, the tragedy remains an open wound.

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