The Perseverance

Author: Raymond Antrobus

Publisher: Tin House (2021)

In the wake of his father’s death, the speaker in British-Jamaican poet 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.

The Perseverance has won the Ted Hughes Award, the Rathbones Poetry Prize, and the Somerset Maugham Award, and was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, among others.