All The Names Given

From the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2019 Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2021 '[Raymond Antrobus] has built another beautiful paper house which you can spend a very long and deeply satisfying time inside.' Mark Haddon 'Moving deftly between tenderness and violence, hope and grief, praise and lament, this is a deeply evocative collection that will linger in the reader’s mind.' Guardian Raymond Antrobus’s astonishing debut collection, The Perseverance, won both Rathbone Folio Prize and the Ted Hughes Award, amongst many other accolades; the poet’s much anticipated second collection, All The Names Given, continues his essential investigation into language, miscommunication, place, and memory. Throughout, All The Names Given is punctuated with [Caption Poems] partially inspired by Deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim, which attempt to fill in the silences and transitions between the poems, as well as moments inside and outside of them. Direct, open, formally sophisticated, All The Names Given breaks new ground both in form and content: the result is a timely, humane and tender book from one of the most important young poets of his generation.

About the Author :
Raymond Antrobus was born in London, Hackney to an English mother and Jamaican father, he is the author of To Sweeten Bitter and The Perseverance. In 2019 he became the first ever poet to be awarded the Rathbone Folio Prize for best work of literature in any genre. Other accolades include the Ted Hughes award, PBS Winter Choice, A Sunday Times Young Writer of the year award and The Guardian Poetry Book Of The Year 2018, as well as being shortlisted for the Griffin Prize and Forward Prize. In 2018 he was awarded The Geoffrey Dearmer Prize, (Judged by Ocean Vuong), for his poem Sound Machine. His poem Jamaican British was added to the GCSE syllabus in 2019.

Review :
[Raymond Antrobus] has built another beautiful paper house which you can spend a very long and deeply satisfying time inside. Moving deftly between tenderness and violence, hope and grief, praise and lament, this is a deeply evocative collection that will linger in the reader’s mind. [Raymond Antrobus's] poetry transcends speech, sound, silence, words – and what we are left with, when we close this astonishing book, is the vibration of the emotion on the blank page. What a beautiful book Raymond Antrobus has written! I love it. So much pain, so much tenderness, so much music and invention and passion in All The Names Given. Truly, it is terrific. Antrobus has a special gift of making music from stories and giving his lyrics gravity and urgency that’s inimitable In All The Names Given, the essential tension is knowledge. Knowledge of self, knowledge of others. These poems make the sublime leap or union of witness to ‘with-ness,’ so their knowledge is not speculative but holds together, beautiful and fraught, the broken burden of honesty: love. Antrobus is a phenomenal poet These poems are revelations. In All the Names Given, Antrobus traces a new dimension where the irreducible particularity of self—race and gender, disability and sexuality, ancestry and futurity—buzzes with coded sound, refusing reduction. This collection is so obviously at the forefront of a new canon whose singular and evocative approach to lyricism and imagistic play demonstrates not only the necessity of our multilingual and multimodal realities, but 'the volume of their power,' too. Raymond Antrobus is as searching a poet as you're likely to find writing today. Raymond Antrobus gives a fully human response to our world in its beauty and cruelty expressed with humour, anger, love and music: ‘All The Names Given’ is a unique and crucial contribution to our new poetry. So much of All the Names Given is this unwrapping of necessary communications: it is a gift of realisations for the reader to explore and come back to again and again.