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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 Hackney, London to an English mother and Jamaican father. He is the author of To Sweeten Bitter, The Perseverance, All The Names Given and the children's picture book Can Bears Ski? A number of his poems were added to the UK's GCSE syllabus in 2022. The BBC Radio 4 documentary Inventions In Sound, which accompanies All The Names Given, was produced by Falling Tree Productions and won a Best Documentary Award at the 2021 Third Coast International Audio Festival.
Summary
Building on his award-winning debut collection, The Perseverance, All the Names Given is a collection of intimate, deeply personal poems flickering with gods and ghosts, and the painful electricity that runs up and down the wires of lineage and inheritance.
Foreword
Building on his award-winning debut collection, The Perseverance, All the Names Given is a collection of intimate, deeply personal poems flickering with gods and ghosts, and the painful electricity that runs up and down the wires of lineage and inheritance.
Additional text
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.
Report
[Raymond Antrobus] has built another beautiful paper house which you can spend a very long and deeply satisfying time inside. Mark Haddon
