The Perseverance
CBC Books | | Posted: June 14, 2019 2:29 PM | Last Updated: June 28, 2019
Raymond Antrobus
Raymond Antrobus is a British-Jamaican poet, performer, editor and educator, born and bred in East London, Hackney. He is one of the world s first recipients of an MA in Spoken Word education from Goldsmiths University. In 2017 he was awarded 1 of 3 inaugural Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowships. Raymond s poetry has appeared on BBC 2, BBC Radio 4 and The Guardian. He has published two pamphlets, Shapes & Disfigurements Of Raymond Antrobus (Burning Eye, 2012) and To Sweeten Bitter (Outspoken Press, 2017). The Perseverance is his first full collection. He lives in Hackney.
One of the most crucial new voices to emerge from Britain, Raymond Antrobus explores the d/Deaf experience, the death of his father and the failure to communicate. Ranging across history, time zones and continents, The Perseverance operates in the in betweens of dual heritages, of form and expression emerging to show us what it means to exist, and to flourish.
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From the book
Echo
My ear amps whistle as if singing
to Echo, Goddess of Noise,
the ravelled knot of tongues, of blaring birds, consonant crumbs
of dull doorbells, sounds swamped
in my misty hearing aid tubes.
Gaudí believed in holy sound
and built a cathedral to contain it,
pulling hearing men from their knees
as though Deafness is a kind of Atheism.
Who would turn down God?
Even though I have not heard
the golden decibel of angels,
I have been living in a noiseless palace
where the doorbell is pulsating
light and I am able to answer.
From The Perseverance by Raymond Antrobus ©2018. Published by Penned in the Margins.