A review by thecolourblue
All The Names Given: Poems by Raymond Antrobus

3.75

Written by a deaf, mixed-race, poet, this collection focuses on the writer's connection with his personal ancestors and history - both his predessors who experienced slavery, and those who perpetrated it. 

Earlier, when he’d found the grave of his great-grandmother by the elderberry tree it was the one time he’d wanted someone white to appear and ask where he was from. It would’ve been no skin off him to point at her stone and say here.

He also uses a cool technique of including 'closed captions' to puntuate some of the poems and also break up the sections of the book, which I really liked.

Some favourites: 

• 'On Vanity' which is very sad, but really hits.
• 'And Dat' ..yes Hackney! (Crackney changed / still / stay dwelling / and dat Paradise moves / but I got to land grab We E8 / East man / ain’t got to adapt Our Kingdom / got no land to hand back)
• ‘Horror Scene as Black English Royal’ is one of the poems that uses captions to punctuate the verses, explores the poet's conflicted feelings about his mixed heritage, particularly his white slave-owning ancestors - his “whitest black blood of the land”.
• 'For John T Williams' and 'For Tyrone Givans' both tell the stories of black deaf men who were killed or imprisoned, and how this situation punished them for the intersection of their deafness and their blackness. 

Those who have loved me before say I made them feel second to some dream I was having. (From ‘Lovable’)