Lost Voices – David Batten
ISBN: 9781788648509
£11.99
Coming in September, pre-order your copy now
Lost Voices reimagines Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul as a chorus of the silenced. Drawing on the Commentaries yet refusing their authority, David Batten’s sequence gives voice to legionnaires, chiefs, mothers, and the land itself, revealing the campaign not as civilising triumph but as devastation—systematic, intimate, and enduring.
Across eight movements mirroring the original campaigns, these poems inhabit both conqueror and conquered: Caesar as strategist, propagandist, and increasingly haunted figure; Gaul as witness, victim, and memory. The language is spare, incantatory, and unflinching—moving from battlefield report to lament, from irony to elegy—until history itself begins to fracture under the weight of what it cannot fully contain.
This is not a retelling but a reckoning. Lost Voices asks what lies between the lines of empire, and what remains when those erased speak again.
Author biography
David Batten was educated at Loughborough and Hull and worked in rural development in Gwynedd, North Wales. He now lives with his partner, Ingrid, in the Aveyron, southern France, where he writes, brews beer and works as a paysagiste.
His previous publications are Transhumance (Cinnamon Press 2016); Storme Passage (pamphlet, Cinnamon Press 2017); Untergang (Cinnamon Press 2018); Rotterdam (novella, Liquorice Fish Books 2019); Winterreis (Cinnamon Press 2021) and Aubrac (Cinnamon Press, 2024).