All The Names Given: Poems
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A Guardian Best Book of the Year
Finalist for the T. S. Eliot Prize and The Costa Poetry Award
“Exquisite.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Brave, tender and generous. . . . A haunting study of what we can find in the silences of history when history is recognized as more than a noun, when recognized as something alive and kinetic.” —Camonghne Felix, author of Build Yourself a Boat
On the heels of his much-lauded debut collection, Raymond Antrobus continues his essential investigation into language, miscommunication, place, and memory in All The Names Given, while simultaneously breaking new ground in both form and content.
The collection opens with poems about the author’s surname—one that shouldn’t have survived into modernity—and examines the rich and fraught history carried within it. As Antrobus outlines a childhood caught between intimacy and brutality, sound and silence, and conflicting racial and cultural identities, the poem becomes a space in which the poet reckons with his own ancestry, and bears witness to the indelible violence of the legacy wrought by colonialism. The poems travel through space—shifting fluidly between England, South Africa, Jamaica, and the American South—and brilliantly move from an examination of family history into the wandering lust of adolescence and finally, vividly, into a complex array of marriage poems—matured, wiser, and more accepting of love’s fragility. Throughout, All The Names Given is punctuated with [Caption Poems] partially inspired by Deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim, in which the art of writing captions attempts to fill in the silences and transitions between the poems as well as moments inside and outside of them.
Formally sophisticated, with a weighty perception and startling directness, All The Names Given is a timely, tender book full of humanity and remembrance from one of the most important young poets of our generation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British poet Antrobus (The Perseverance) dedicates his powerful second collection to his mother, who supplied his surname, a name "so anciently English (Norse) that it has become foreign to itself." The rich complication present in these poems is that while his mother is white, descended from the titled Antrobus clan that enslaved Jamaicans, his father was Jamaican: "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," he writes in "Plantation Paint." Antrobus, who grew up deaf then was given hearing aids in late childhood, weaves his experiences negotiating language, race, and family, skillfully pairing love with anger. Of his mother, he recalls, in "It Was Cold Under My Breath": "You said I don't think/ I heard anything and left the room,/ and I hated you for not/ belting the brat out of me." Several single-line " are inspired by Deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim, providing a formally ambitious and visually captivating "silence" on the page. Antrobus beautifully pays witness to the legacy of colonialism while providing another gripping meditation on language and communication.
