To Sweeten Bitter

Raymond Antrobus

• Publisher: Out Spoken Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780993103872
• eBook ISBN: 9781916046801
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

After the death of his father, Raymond returns to Jamaica but restless questions begin to unearth inside him ( Who I am now is something I need to remember ). Upon returning to the UK Raymond travelled to Bristol, Liverpool, Hastings, Hull and around London to meditate in the places where the pain and grief of history is bigger than his own.

Bottomless

i. A Dark And Bitter Thing

When my dad gives me

my first sip of his Guinness

I suck up a face

that does not know

what to do with the taste.

ii. In Mum’s Kitchen

My birthday boy face

glimmers

when the lights

turn of.

There is no shape

of my dad in the dark.

My yellow badge says

I am 6 today

and the burst

rubber balloons say

I am a love child,

everything about me

is accidental.

iii. Music

My mum cleans the kitchen,

opens all the windows, blaring

mixtapes dad made in the 80s.

The ones he would bring round

after he beat her.

His smooth DJ voice croons

Ain’t Nobody’s Fault But Mine

from the tape deck, treating

the wound with music.

In a year she’ll leave him

but for now she sings along,

sweeping cake crumbs

under the table.

iv. Running Away

When mum took us

to run away from dad,

my sister’s eyes formed search parties.

Who calls their children

on their summer holidays to say,

know what I’m going to do?

I’m going to burn the house down.

v. My Dad Drunk

Said he was ashamed

to have white children.

Which was confusing

because when sober

he called me black.

Maybe I became

an uptown shade –

ghosts

he saw

in the white foam

of his drained pint glass.

vi. Promise

Watching him sleep

in his hospital bed,

a thought rises in me -

a black mouthful

of things I have been

trying to keep down since

childhood. I realise that

I have always forgiven him

for everything, because

he promised me one

day he was going to die.

I want to bury the sounds of living

in his ears with the birds,

and every little thing with a song,

where nothing is heavy like this place,

where someone I love is the shape

of   a   missing   thing.

Notes on the poems

In The Supermarket has a ghost poem in italics.

To Sweeten Bitter came out of an Oblique Strategy exercise using the first words I flicked to at random in my Dad’s dictionary.

Give Away His Clothes is a variation of a Haibun.

Recognising Leon was inspired by the poet Mark Turcotte.

Jamaican British is a Broken Ghazal inspired by Arron Samuels.

Scratched Light was commissioned by Jay Bird Live Literature for National Poetry Day, responding to early - late afternoon light and was partly inspired by the poem Light Of The World by Derek Walcott. Phoebe Boswell is a Kenyan-British artist and film maker based in London.

Look There’s A Black Man Touch Him is an adaptation of my Dad’s story arriving in the UK.

In The Classroom is in the voice of a number of year 10 students at Cardinal Pole Catholic School in Hackney who were debating the use of the word “nigger” in Of Mice And Men by John Steinbeck after one student threw the book across the room and refused to carry on reading it.

The original title for this collection was The Island That’s Hard To Find In English. I went exploring in Liverpool, Hull, London, Bristol and other parts of the UK significant to Britain’s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• His Heart
• In The Supermarket
• Goodnight Africa Man
• To Sweeten Bitter
• Recognising Leon
• Jamaican British
• Miami Airport
• Give Away His Clothes
• Two Days And Two Nights In Kisumu, Kenya
• When He Died
• On A Boat, Zipping The Black River In Jamaica
• Dementia
• Kingston To Morant Bay
• To Say
• Scratched Light
• Look, There’s A Black Man, Touch Him
• Lifeguard
• In The Classroom
• The Day Is All Over Me Until I Find That Place
• What Is Possible
• Bottomless
• Notes on the poems
• Acknowledgements
• Bio
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