The Perseverance E-Book

Raymond Antrobus

• Herausgeber: Penned in the Margins
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 42

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

*Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2019* Winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize 2019 * Winner of the Ted Hughes Award 2018 * Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award * Shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize *The Perseverance is the multi-award-winning debut by British-Jamaican poet Raymond Antrobus. Ranging across history and continents, these poems operate in the spaces in between, their haunting lyrics creating new, hybrid territories. The Perseverance is a book of loss, contested language and praise, where elegies for the poet's father sit alongside meditations on the d/Deaf experience. Audiobook now available from Audible, Amazon and iTunes.

Leseprobe

THEPERSEVERANCE

Raymond Antrobus was born in Hackney, London to an English mother and Jamaican father. He is the recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, Complete Works III and Jerwood Compton Poetry. He is one of the world’s first recipients of an MA in Spoken Word Education from Goldsmiths, University of London. Raymond is a founding member of Chill Pill and the Keats House Poets Forum. He has had multiple residencies in deaf and hearing schools around London, as well as Pupil Referral Units. In 2018 he was awarded the Geoffrey Dearmer Award by the Poetry Society (judged by Ocean Vuong). Raymond currently lives in London and spends most his time working nationally and internationally as a freelance poet and teacher.

ALSOBYRAYMONDANTROBUS

POETRYPAMPHLETS

To Sweeten Bitter (Out-Spoken Press, 2017)

Shapes & Disfigurements Of Raymond Antrobus

     (Burning Eye Books, 2012)

PUBLISHEDBYPENNEDINTHEMARGINS

Toynbee Studios, 28 Commercial Street, London E1 6AB

www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk

All rights reserved

© Raymond Antrobus 2018

The right of Raymond Antrobus to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Penned in the Margins.

First published 2018

Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International

ISBN: 978-1-908058-5-22

ePub ISBN: 978-1-908058-6-69

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

CONTENTS

Echo

Aunt Beryl Meets Castro

My Mother Remembers

Jamaican British

Ode to My Hair

The Perseverance

I Move Through London like a Hotep

Sound Machine

Dear Hearing World

‘Deaf School’ by Ted Hughes

After Reading ‘Deaf School’ by the Mississippi River

For Jesula Gelin, Vanessa Previl and Monique Vincent

Conversation with the Art Teacher (a Translation Attempt)

The Ghost of Laura Bridgeman Warns Helen Keller About Fame

The Mechanism of Speech

Doctor Marigold Re-evaluated

The Shame of Mable Gardiner Hubbards

Two Guns in the Sky for Daniel Harris

To Sweeten Bitter

I Want the Confidence of

After Being Called a Fucking Foreigner in London Fields

Closure

Maybe I Could Love a Man

Samantha

Thinking of Dad’s Dick

Miami Airport

His Heart

Dementia

Happy Birthday Moon

NOTES

FURTHERREADING

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to the editors at the following publications, where some of these poems were published previously, often in earlier versions: POETRY, Poetry Review, The Deaf Poets Society, Magma, The Rialto, Wildness, Modern Poetry in Translation, Ten: Poets of the New Generation (Bloodaxe Books), The Mighty Stream, Filigree, Stairs and Whispers, And Other Poems, International Literature Showcase, New Statesman.

I am grateful for support from Arts Council England, Sarah Sanders and Sharmilla Beezmohun at Speaking Volumes, Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship, Complete Works III, Cave Canem, Hannah Lowe, Shira Erlichman, Tom Chivers, my mother, my sister and Tabitha. The Austin family who gave me a place to stay in New Orleans, where I finished the manuscript. Malika Booker, Jacob Sam-La Rose, Nick Makoha, Peter Kahn.

Big up Renata, Ruth and all the NHS speech and language therapists I’ve had over the years. Big up Miss Mukasa, Miss Walker and Miss Willis, the English and support teachers at Blanche Neville Deaf School who helped me develop language and a D/deaf identity in the hearing world. I am me because you are you.

ThePerseverance

‘There is no telling what language isinside the body’

ROBINCOSTELEWIS

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.

What?

A word that keeps looking

in mirrors, in love

with its own volume.

What?

I am a one-word question,

a one-man

patience test.

What?

What language

would we speak

without ears?

What?

Is paradise

a world where

I hear everything?

What?

How will my brain

know what to hold

if it has too many arms?

The day I clear out my dead father’s flat,

I throw away boxes of moulding LPs:

Garvey, Malcolm X, Mandela speeches on vinyl.

I find a TDK cassette tape on the shelf.

The smudged green label reads Raymond Speaking.

I play the tape in his vintage cassette player

and hear my two-year-old voice chanting my name, Antrob,