For those readers of Jay Bernard’s debut Surge who are not familiar with the historical event to which it responds, there is a carefully detailed author’s foreword. On 18 January 1981, 13 black teenagers were killed in a house fire that engulfed a birthday party at 439 New Cross Road in south-east London. A subsequent apparent suicide, driven by grief, would bring the final death toll to 14. The cause of the New Cross Fire – it may have been a hate crime – has never been determined and the governmental silence that followed (prompting the refrain at the time “13 dead, nothing said”), in addition to hostile, haphazard official investigations, speaks to a long history of racism in Britain. Later that year, uprisings against police discrimination in Brixton, Toxteth and elsewhere would lead to a new era in black British history and identity.

Although the fire, the subsequent protests and the founding of the Black People’s Day of Action were documented by poets Linton Kwesi Johnson and Benjamin Zephaniah among others, Bernard’s work uniquely addresses a new generation encountering this past almost afresh, as it is echoed painfully in the present. A key element of the project is Bernard’s exploration of black radical British history in the George Padmore Institute’s archives, against the backdrop of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, the xenophobia of the Windrush scandal and Brexit. This interrogation of the tensions between “public narration and private truths” is found throughout Surge. Bernard, who uses the gender-neutral pronoun “they”, reminds us that the self is an overlaying of multiple identities, comprised not just of what is remembered and forgotten, but of how one is located in the wider questions of belonging, memory and solidarity.

In the poems “Ark” and “Ark II” Bernard draws the lyric subject into a complex relation with the past and present. “Ark” describes the materiality of the archive’s documents – audio and video recordings, press cuttings and photos, some of which are reproduced here as artefacts. where to put the burning house, the child made ash, the brick in the back of the neck, the shit in the letter box and piss up the side of it? // I file it under fire, corpus, body, house.

I take this January morning in my hands and wonder if it should go under London, England, Britain, British, Black-British –

where to put the burning house, the child made ash, the brick in the back of the neck, the shit in the letter box and piss up the side of it?

I file it under fire, corpus, body, house.

Bernard weaves the fragility of the archive’s contents with an expanded definition of the archive itself: a body of knowledge that is housed and organised according to the inclusive and exclusive laws of provenance and belonging. Where, the poet asks, does the body sit across the categorisations of national, local and ethnic identities if the traumas of personal and systemic violence make being at home impossible? The fire becomes an existential threat beyond its historical moment, and the ephemera lovingly preserved in the archive become an ark in the flood of time. This metaphor is extended in the prose poem “Ark II”: “Night meets me near Ladbroke Grove / with a warm June morning in my hands / in the story I am trying to tell / what doesn’t fit is part of the hole”.

Here the morning of the first poem has turned to darkness, and the winter of New Cross becomes the summer of Grenfell. To tell the whole of – or explain the “hole” in – the story requires justice for those who have died. In spite of the traces of memory and the mourning rituals of commemoration, the truth “lives inside the house” and may never be known.

Similarly, “Songbook” and “Songbook II” draw on musical forms associated with transatlantic black culture and civil rights. The first poem, inspired by Johnson’s dub poem “New Crass Massakah”, originally appeared as part of Bernard’s 2018 Ted Hughes prize-winning multimedia work, Surge: Side A. Here “back”, “attack”, “tack” (as in changing tactics) and “lack” imperceptibly move from the party’s celebratory reggae to the revolutionary anthems of race equality that would follow that fateful night. Its sonic counterpart appears later on in the collection, as a haunting echo of a mother’s loss: “I haven’t seen her, nor have you / Not since the fire at 439 / I heard her daughter was gone for days / They wouldn’t let her see the remains.” Based on recorded interviews with survivors, these works, as well as the frenetic “Proof” and another mirrored pair entitled “+” and “-”, give ignored and sometimes maligned voices back the integrity they deserve. Elsewhere, poems allude to radical black diaspora thinkers such as CLR James, Édouard Glissant and Aimé Césaire, all of whom stand within a transatlantic discourse on race. Where sexuality and eroticism appear later in the collection, as in “Pride”, one senses the lyric self emerging into a space rightly intent on self-definition and liberation. Bernard writes: “I am from here, I am specific to this place, I am haunted by this history but I also haunt it back.” In fact, the collection’s major achievement is its unfailing attentiveness to the framing of history through the stories of individuals and collectives that the poet holds, urgently, ethically and so skilfully, in their hands.

• Surge by Jay Bernard is published by Chatto (£10). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.