Introduction

Introduction

We travel light; we’re light that’s yet to travel.

– Llŷr Gwyn Lewis, ‘Remnants’

Look up. This is the exhortation at the heart of About Us, a spectacular multimedia show and learning and participation programme commissioned by UNBOXED: Creativity in the UK. Visiting Paisley, DerryLondonderry, Caernarfon, Luton, Hull and London, About Us combined projection-mapped animation, music and poetry to tell our shared story from the Big Bang to the present day.

The project began life in the depths of a Covid-19 lockdown and the intention behind it was simple: to create a cultural event that would inspire a renewed sense of wonder and hope. At its core was the idea that we are all made of stardust: look up at the night sky, the project suggests, and know that you and everyone with whom you share this space began life in a distant star. In other words, we come from the same place, the same past. So, too, is our future a shared one.

This sense of connection has driven every aspect of About Us. The project brought together a team of artists and scientists in a cross-disciplinary collaboration. The Poetry Society worked with video design company 59 Productions and social enterprise Stemettes.

Over the course of the project, thousands of poems have been written exploring how the universe is connected, from commissions that appeared in the show to educational resources for schools, from poems written by young poets in schools and community groups to those entered into a poetry and coding competition.

This anthology showcases a selection of these poems. The poets represented range from T. S. Eliot Prizewinning Jen Hadfield to five-year-old Charlotte Gage, who is just at the start of her poetic journey. There are voices from across the UK and further afield, poems in English, Welsh and Gaeilge, included here in their original language, poems that incorporate Scots and Shetland dialect, a poem in British Sign Language.

Commissioned poems by Llŷr Gwyn Lewis, Jen Hadfield, Jason Allen-Paisant, Khairani Barokka, Stephen Sexton and Grug Muse illustrate the trajectory of the show, transporting us from the birth of the universe to the digital age. As well as interacting with these poems in the anthology, readers can situate them in the context of the live light show by watching the film at bit.ly/AboutUsUnboxed. These different experiences of the commissioned poems – whether it’s the quiet pleasure of the page or the sensory overload of poetry brought to life with beautiful animation and a swelling choral soundtrack – offer parallel insights into a key takeaway of About Us: that poetry is alive, it is dynamic, it moves as we do through time and space, it reflects us back at ourselves.

Connection is once again a common theme in the poems commissioned for educational resources. Sairah Ahsan, Jack Cooper, Áine Ní Ghlinn, John Hegley, Cheryl Moskowitz, Caleb Parkin (collaborating with Jane Hills and Isla Keesje Davidson) and Dan Simpson have created a series of playful and curiositydriven poems designed for use in schools. Covering topics like DNA, symbiosis, deforestation, astronomy and more, these poems and accompanying learning resources are freely available for use in the classroom. In addition, teachers in secondary schools can access video interviews with some of the commissioned poets, which are designed to complement this anthology and explore ways of approaching poetry at GCSE.

For further inspiration, look to the poems written by young people themselves. A competition for young poets and coders aged 4-18 saw over 1,800 entries from across the UK and eighteen countries internationally. A team of judges, including Simon Armitage, Kathleen Jamie, Ifor ap Glyn, Stephen Sexton and Keith Jarrett, selected the best entries. The winners, whose poems are collected here, come from all corners of the UK – from Devon to Edinburgh, from the Isle of Wight to Ceredigion, from Belfast to Yorkshire – as well as overseas, from Pakistan and Australia. Writing on the theme of how the universe is connected, these young writers represent a diversity of voices that nonetheless share a common tone of wonder and an ability to pinpoint the individual within the cosmos.

Winning poems by Elsie Hayward, April Egan, Jasmine Haynes, Freya Leech, Aashka Vardhman and Faith Lydall use space as a means to explore what makes us human. Jhermayne Ubalde, Neda Aryan, Filippo Rossi, Etta O’Flaherty Jones, Missy Ashiru and Dillon Watt take us on a journey through deep time, interrogating not only where we came from but what we will leave behind. Varad Toke, Martha Blue, Meredydd Davies, Leonie Hanan, Logan Smith, and Florence Hall focus on our relationship with the natural world and the responsibility we have towards it. And poems by Kaila Patterson, Laiba Yousuf, Awyr and Charlotte Gage embody the tenderness of human-to-human connection.

Theirs are by no means the only young voices included in this anthology. It was our privilege to work in schools in each of the locations where the live show took place. Poets delivered workshops on the theme of connection, working with forty-six schools and three community groups, most of which appear in this anthology.

When we sent poets into schools, the brief was simple: the children should create a collaborative class poem about how we are connected. The scale and themes of the project could have been daunting – a recurring joke was that we were condensing 13.8 billion years into the space of 25 minutes – but, as is often the case, the poems found their groove by responding with specifics. Yes, we were thinking about the whole universe but we were also, and importantly, thinking about Paisley, Derry, Caernarfon, Luton and Hull. We were thinking about the local park, about Irn Bru and Derry Girls, about pet hamsters, cousin Shea, dad’s laugh, about seagulls, about the view from the school playground.

In this respect, the poems collected here encapsulate the significance of the project’s title. About Us not only gestures towards the whole universe around and about us, but it has also been an invitation to everyone who has taken part to show us what matters to them, what is special about their home town, what their community looks like.

We are so grateful to everyone who took part for their generosity in sharing that with us. With this anthology, we hope others, too, will be inspired by the poems created for About Us. Thank you to UNBOXED: Creativity in the UK; thank you to 59 Productions and Stemettes; thank you to all the stakeholders, local councils, community leaders and translators; thank you to all the poets.

‘Lightly is the language’, Stephen Sexton tells us in his commissioned poem. It is fitting that so many of the poems in this anthology take light as a recurring motif – collectively, they capture that peculiar ability poetry has to behave as light does, travelling, shimmering, signalling from me to you.

When we say goodnight –from my dark room to yours, yours to mine –we speak as stars do, with light.

– Stephen Sexton, ‘Lightly Is the Language’