"The Perseverance" by Raymond Antrobus (Penned in the margins, 2018)

Poems from Poetry, Poetry Review, Magma, The Rialto, New Statesman, etc. There are 4 pages of small-text notes at the end.

I was ok until the dramatic monologues that start on p.21 (dialect or not, "Aunt Beryl Meets Castro" is mini-prose) and "Jamaican British" which doesn't say much. "Ode to my hair" is better, ending with "now you've grown a wildness,/ trying to be my father's 'fro/ to grow him out, to see him again". "The Perseverance" is a fairly tight sestina. I like "Dear Hearing World" - witty, etc. Ditto for "After Reading 'Deaf School' by the Mississippi River", which ends with "The mouth of the river laughs. A man in a wetsuit emerges,/ pulls misty goggles over his head. Couldn't see a thing./ He breathes heavily. My face was in darkness.// No one heard him; the river drowned him out".

"For Jesula Gelin, Vanessa Previl and Monique Vincent" (4 pages long - maybe 250 words) is in a style that but for the line-breaks I use for short prose - Flash CNF. "Two Guns in the Sky for Daniel Harris" is in couplets for no reason I can see, and p.60-61 has dozens of unneeded line-breaks which increase my skepticism. The Samantha poems do little for me (the irony of "speaking in tongues" isn't lost on me). The book ends with a pantoum whose final line is, fittingly, "As Dad reads aloud, I follow his finger across the page"

There's quite a lot to like here, not least about the misunderstandings that can arise from using sign language. I think people who don't normally read poetry will like much of it too. The poems deal with a variety of themes, sometimes more than one per poem (his father, attitudes to deafness, and racism combine well - "you don't look deaf", says a Miami Airport official).

And yet ... this book activates a suspicion in me about the effect of labelling a text as "poetry". The term's become a convenient catch-all, a way to bundle various texts together that would otherwise not be marketable. I think several of the pieces here are more naturally formatted as prose - anecdotes, opinion pieces, etc. I'm beginning to wonder whether poetry is being used as a small pool where pieces of wrought prose can make a bigger splash. And terming a text as "poetry" still grants a piece an aura, a license not granted prose. On top of that I can imagine critics being wary of criticizing this author.

The notes include information like "This poem is a Sestina", and that Alexander Graham Bell married a deaf woman, giving talks discouraging the use of sign language. There's a note on D/deaf, including "Small d deaf people are often those who become deaf in later life, after they have acquired a spoken language. Their relationship with deafness is more medical than cultural."

Other reviews

• Martyn Crucefix (it is a collection that has achieved the difficult task of transcending the acclamation of the poetry world to a much more widespread appreciation ... its forms, syntax and punctuation are nothing out of the ordinary ... what really marks the book out as special is that impossible-to-teach, impossible-to-fake, not especially ultra-modern quality of compassion. I think the portrait of the “complicated man”, Raymond Antrobus’ father, is remarkable. ... This is a first collection that barely puts a foot wrong and thoroughly deserves the praise that has already been heaped upon it.)
• Hackney Citizen
• Jackie Law (The writing is accessible; the subject matter and emotion clear. The author takes the reader into his territory)
• Sarah Hobbs (The overarching aim of this collection is clear - to educate readers on D/deaf and British Sign Language (BSL). ... Deep personal lyricism followed by a profound understanding of a much wider and topical issue that affects multitudes of people. He brings the personal and the impersonal together - seamlessly.)
• Catriona Troth (Poetry does not take you by the hand and lead you, as fiction does. It demands work from the reader to chisel out meaning. I found myself spending time delving back into Antrobus’s references before reading the poems again.)
• Victoria Adukwei Bulley (There is a clear statement here about the potential for inhumanity faced by d/Deaf individuals in a predominantly hearing world, and the unrelenting persistence of this reality. ... Time and again Antrobus demonstrates his finely tuned awareness that the purpose of language has only ever been to create signs – vehicles of meaning – that enable us to reach one another.)
• Richard Lance Keeble (Some of the most moving, tender, lyrical and revelatory poems are about his father. ... one of the most wonderful and original aspects of this collection is the way in which Antrobus invites us to explore both his poems – and his world beyond the poems.)