The Perseverance

by Raymond Antrobus

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

A beautiful work of poetry that shows us how poetry, a spoken art form, can be transformed by someone who cannot hear. We love how Antrobus brings us to another world. It makes us joyful that once again poetry, and reading for that matter, brings so many experiences to our doorsteps.

Featured on NPR's Morning Edition

A Best Book of the Year at The Guardian, The Sunday Times, Poetry School, New York Public Library, and Entropy Magazine

Winner of the Ted Hughes Award, Rathbones Folio Prize, and Somerset Maugham Award; finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and Reading the West Book Award

In the wake of his father’s death, the speaker in Raymond Antrobus’ The Perseverance travels to Barcelona. In Gaudi’s Cathedral, he meditates on the idea of silence and sound, wondering whether acoustics really can bring us closer to God. Receiving information through his hearing aid technology, he considers how deaf people are included in this idea. “Even though,” he says, “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.”

The Perseverance is a collection of poems examining a d/Deaf experience alongside meditations on loss, grief, education, and language, both spoken and signed. It is a book about communication and connection, about cultural inheritance, about identity in a hearing world that takes everything for granted, about the dangers we may find (both individually and as a society) if we fail to understand each other.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781951142421
Publisher:	Tin House Books
Publication date:	03/30/2021
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	680,232
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Raymond Antrobus was born in London, Hackney, to an English mother and Jamaican father. He is the author of two other poetry collections, The Perseverance and All The Names Given. He is a recipient of the Ted Hughes Award, the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award, a Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the T.S Eliot Prize, Griffin Prize and the Forward Prize. In 2018 he was awarded The Geoffrey Dearmer Prize (judged by Ocean Vuong) for his poem Sound Machine. He has also published two children's picture books, Can Bears Ski? and Terrible Horses and hosted a number of award-winning radio documentaries including “Inventions In Sound” (BBC Radio 4, 2021). He is a Cave Canem graduate in the US, a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature in the UK, and divides his time between England and New Orleans.

Table of Contents

Echo 1

Aunt Beryl Meets Castro 9

My Mother Remembers 11

Jamaican British 13

Ode to My Hair 14

The Perseverance 16

I Move Through London like a Hotep 18

Sound Machine 20

Dear Hearing World 22

'Deaf School' by Ted Hughes 25

After Reading 'Deaf School' by the Mississippi River 27

For Jesula Gelin, Vanessa Previl and Monique Vincent 28

Conversation with the Art Teacher (a Translation Attempt) 32

The Ghost of Laura Bridgman Warns Helen Keller About Fame 33

The Mechanism of Speech 35

Doctor Marigold Re-evaluated 36

The Shame of Mabel Gardiner Hubbard 37

Two Guns in the Sky for Daniel Harris 38

To Sweeten Bitter 40

I Want the Confidence of 42

After Being Called a Fucking Foreigner in London Fields 44

Closure 46

Maybe I Could Love a Man 47

Samantha 49

Thinking of Dads Dick 59

Miami Airport 60

His Heart 62

Dementia 64

Happy Birthday Moon 65

Acknowledgements 67

Notes 69

Further Reading 73

Interview with the Author 75

Editorial Reviews

★ 01/18/2021

“All good words in sign are said with the thumb,” a sign language teacher declares in Antrobus’s moving debut. Exploring his early experience of deafness, Antrobus invites the reader to feel the frustration and emotional complexity of navigating through the world: “I was a broken speaker, you were never a broken interpreter.” Language and communication become touchstones of the collection; poems like “Aunt Beryl Meets Castro” evoke Jamaican patois (“Listen listen, you know I/ met Castro in Jamaica in/ ’77 mi work with/ government under Manley”). Equally memorable is Antro-bus’s consideration of his embattled identity: “There is such a thing as a key confidently cut/ that accepts the locks it doesn’t fit.” However, it’s his evocations of his late father, a Jamaican immigrant who battled alcoholism and faced British policemen “who didn’t believe he belonged/ unless they heard his English,/ which was smooth as some uptown roads,” that gives the collection its heart. What might be gimmicky or sentimental—the poem “Thinking of Dad’s Dick,” for instance—becomes moving and memorable: “He knew he wouldn’t live/ to see me grown... He had to give,/ while he could, the length of his life to me.” In these pages, Antrobus’s evocative, musical honesty is unforgettable. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"An extraordinary debut."

Entropy Magazine - Best Poetry Books of 2020 - 2021

"Stunning."

New York Public Library

"Emotionally textured and sonically charged. . . . the poem [‘Sound Machine’] gyrates through interrogations of grief and ancestry twinned with a brooded meditation on masculinity and selfhood."

Ocean Vuong

"It channels Danez Smith, Malika Booker and Caroline Bird, in formal poems, erasures, free verse, innovative use of Makaton symbols, translation, prose, and a blackout version of Ted Hughes’ ‘Deaf School’; probably the best poem I read all year, and it doesn’t even have any words in it."

Poetry School Will Barrett

"Clear, unflinching. . . . We expand our comprehension of humanness in encountering these poems, and recognize the limits of language that is only spoken and heard—The Perseverance is language embodied and utterly present."

Khadijah Queen Recommends Orion Magazine

"The Perseverance relates Antrobus’s experiences of being biracial and d/Deaf in sharp and beautiful poems. . . . These poems are expressive and beautiful and will leave readers thinking differently about sound and silence."

BuzzFeed

"This book is a gift, for how it repurposes my understanding of treacherous feelings, and shapes them into something worth sticking around for."

Hanif Abdurraqib

"Innovative and urgent. . . . Deserves a wide readership."

BookPage

"The Perseverance is an insightful, frank and intimate rumination on language, identity, heritage, loss and the art of communication. . . . These are courageous autobiographical poems of praise, difficulties, testimony and love."

Malika Booker

"Insightful."

Cool Hunting

"Outstanding."

Chicago Review of Books

"Intimate and searching."

The New York Times Book Review

"Antrobus can be gentle, tactile, and pointed in this book—which collects into an affirmation, a pronouncement."

The Millions

"Raymond Antrobus's compelling debut, The Perseverance, confronts deeply rooted prejudice against deaf people."

The Guardian

"An affecting, accessible, and astonishingly raw collection of poems."

October Hill Magazine

"A poet who traverses a diversity of worlds."

Colorlines

"At every turn, Antrobus pushes back against flattening, against the tidy narrative—an invidious Ted Hughes poem gets radically revised, an aunt’s misheard utterance becomes ‘a faint fog horn, a lost river.’ It’s magic, the way this poet is able to bring together so much—deafness, race, masculinity, a mother’s dementia, a father’s demise—with such dexterity."

Kaveh Akbar

"Honest, raw and striking. . . . Antrobus captures the feeling of isolation that comes with navigating a world not made for everyone who exists within it."

Arkansas International

"Remarkable. Antrobus, who was born deaf, writes about grief, race and violence in lines that are startlingly immediate and provocative."

The Washington Post

"A memorable collection. . . . Antrobus interlaces wit and pathos as he examines his identity as a deaf British Jamaican man in a world between sign language and speech."

The Sunday Times