Dementia by Raymond Antrobus
Dementia
Raymond Antrobus‘black with widening amnesia’
Derek WalcottWhen his sleeping face
was a scrunched tissue,
wet with babbling,you came, unravelling a joy,
making him euphoric, dribbling
from his mouth–you simplified a complicated man,
swallowed his past
until your breath was
warm as Caribbean
concrete–O tender syndrome
steady in his greying eyes,
fading song
in his grand dancehall,if you must,
do your gentle magic,
but make me unafraid
of what isdisappearing.
KEEP READING
SHARED WITH GRATITUDE
This poem appeared in The Perseverance Paperback by Raymond Antrobus, published by Tin House Books, 2021. (Available direct from Tin House Books • Also on: Amazon • Bookshop)
DESCRIPTION
“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.” (Source)
ABOUT RAYMOND ANTROBUS
Raymond Antrobus’s poetry collections include Signs, Music (Tin House, 2024), All the Names Given (Picador/Tin House, 2021) and The Perseverance (Penned in the Margins, 2018). His memoir is The Quiet Ear: An Investigation of Missing Sound (Hogarth, 2025). (Source)
Read more poems by Raymond Antrobus • Find books by this poet on Amazon • Bookshop • Follow on Instagram • Twitter • Website • Or view my library
ENDNOTES
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