Lost Voices

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.