The Perseverance

Raymond Antrobus

• Publisher: Penned In The Margins
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781908058669
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

*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.

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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,

and Dad’s laughter crackling in the background,

not knowing I couldn’t hear the word “bus”

and wouldn’t until I got my hearing aids.

Now I sit here listening to the space of deafness —

Antrob, Antrob, Antrob.

‘And if you don’t catch nothing

then something wrong with your ears —

they been tuned to de wrong frequency.’

KEI MILLER

So maybe I belong to the universe

underwater, where all songs

are smeared wailings for Salacia,

Goddess of Salt Water, healer

of infected ears, which is what the doctor

thought I had, since deafness

did not run in the family

but came from nowhere;

so they syringed olive oil

and salt water, and we all waited

to see what would come out.

And no one knew what I was missing

until a doctor gave me a handful of Lego

and said to put a brick on the table

every time I heard a sound.

After the test I still held enough bricks

in my hand to build a house

and call it my sanctuary,

call it the reason I sat in saintly silence

during my grandfather’s sermons when he preached

The Good ...