Border-crossing: These deaths are not inevitable

This article is situated in my own work in poetry. It falls into two parts: the first takes off from my own work to explore different practices of bordering; the second part continues that exploration by reference to recent work by Caroline Bergvall and Jeff Hilson. The first section explores my sequence, ‘the war against tourism’. These poems were written between December 2003 and July 2006 in the environment created by the US Patriot Act 2001 and the Homeland Security Act 2002. The Homeland Security Act both foregrounded the protection of borders and introduced ‘homeland’ into US political discourse. The first section will focus on my sequence of site-specific poems (written on flights), which explore ‘homeland security’, refugees, terrorism, profiling, border interrogations and identity. It will consider border-crossings and how identity figures in these poems in the context of mobility. The second section, ‘these deaths are not inevitable’, focuses on Caroline Bergvall’s volume Drift and its engagement with the ‘left-to-die’ boat within a longer history of migration by sea, going back to the Anglo-Saxons bringing their culture to Britain in the fifth century. The article concludes with a brief examination of Jeff Hilson’s conceptual poem, ‘A Final Poem with Full Stops’, and how deaths in the Mediterranean relate to recent treatment of borders, refugees and migrants.