All the Names Given by Raymond Antrobus; The Sun Is Open by Gail McConnell; Single Window by Daniel Sluman; The Kids by Hannah Lowe
Raymond Antrobus’s second collection, All the Names Given(Picador), builds on themes in his award-winning debut, The Perseverance, including meditations on the d/Deaf experience. In this book, Antrobus brings history to bear on the present through references to poets ranging from William Blake to Kamau Braithwaite, exploring love, marriage and brotherhood, as well as colonial inheritance, racism, ableism and intergenerational trauma. In “Plantation Paint”, Antrobus responds to “Plantation Burial”, an artwork by the 19th-century painter John Antrobus, and wonders how one might make sense of a surname “so anciently English that it has become foreign to itself”. The speaker asks: “Tell me if I’m closer / to the white painter / with my name than I am / to the black preacher, / his hands wide to the sky, / the mahogany rot / of heaven”. These lyric poems are also linguistically innovative, spanning standard English, Jamaican patois and British sign language. Elsewhere, a sequence of caption poems inspired by Deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim serves as an important riposte to the hegemony of our hearing-centric world:
[sound of strangers arriving]
[squirming in suit]
[sound of light between us]