Raymond Antrobus' "The Perseverance" teachers' review for NSW HSC 2027-2028

Brief description and distinctive features

Teaching these poems cannot commence until Term 4 2026 and will be first examined in 2027.

Brief description of The Perseverance

The Perseverance was praised by chair of the judges of the Rathbones Folio Prize as:

"an immensely moving book of poetry which uses his deaf experience, bereavement and Jamaican-British heritage to consider the ways we all communicate with each other."

The set poems are about lived experiences or experiences shared with the poet, and about how language is used in time and place.  In his Notes at the end of his collection Antrobus explains the inspiration for many of his poems. ‘Echo’ is a form of introduction to the collection as it reveals his diagnosis and his family. ‘Jamaican British’ was inspired by Aaron Samuel’s poem ‘Broken Ghazal’. The collection also looks at Deaf people in history as Laura Bridgman, the person central to the poem in ‘The Ghost of Laura Bridgman Warns Helen Keller About Fame’, was a Deaf-Blind student at the Blind Asylum in Boston who became famous when Charles Dickens took an interest in her. Bridgeman is quoted in the poem. ‘Dr Marigold Reevaluated’, also has a Dickens connection as it is based on a short story written by the British author. ‘Dear Hearing World’, modelled on Danez Smith’s poem, ‘Dear White America’, was originally written as a rant for performance about the poet’s experiences as a deaf child.   

Distinctive features of The Perseverance

• The title for the collection is Perseverance and is named after the London pub favoured by the poet’s father, who often left his son outside with 50p. 
• Many of the poems are elegies for his father, as the poet, who had a difficult relationship with his father, found himself re-evaluating who his father was after his death 
• The poems give insight into both the hearing and Deaf worlds 
• The poet employs rich imagery, the clever use of repetition and other techniques as he draws on his own experiences and that of others to represent the difficulty and joys of living in different cultures and identities 
• The poet’s concerns are for language, family, connection, education, grief, identity including d/Deaf identity and the effects of culture and heritage across generations; “all the earthly and ethereal things to do with how one might stay tethered to the living” 
• The poems reveal how spoken, signed and written language can have racial and class implications that can destroy and create connections 
• Some poems are supplemented by sign images and the British Sign language for ‘perseverance’ and other words can be found at the BSL sign bank

Note: Raymond Antrobus has notes about the spelling of d/Deaf at the end of his book. The poems use variations of big D and little d/Deaf. Capitalisation can be used in reference to the individual born Deaf or the Deaf community to show respect and deference. It also indicates a cultural identity, rather than a disability. The lower case deaf refers to the physical condition of having hearing loss and can also refer to people who become deaf in later life after they have acquired a spoken language and whose relationship with deafness is more medical than cultural.

Ways to use The Perseverance in the classroom

Teaching these poems cannot commence until Term 4 2026 and will be first examined in 2027.

Background to teaching poetry 

On first looking at a poem… 

Re-visit strategies for reading and accessing a poem to build student competence and above all, confidence. They don’t need to be trying to fathom a convoluted puzzle or apply unfamiliar terminology but to admire and enjoy the way Antrobus has shaped meaning.  

Hints for reading a poem

• Trust your own insights 
• Expect the unexpected in a poem: something unusual, different, out of place
• You are unlikely to understand everything in one reading
• Be sure to hear the poem or read it aloud: follow the punctuation 
• What does the title say to you before you have read the poem? 
• What is happening in the poem? 
• What does the poet think about this experience and what does s/he want to share with us?

Ways in to teaching The Perseverance poems in the classroom in English Standard: Language, identity and culture

In this Focus Area Language, identity and culture, students study ONE prescribed text in detail and a range of textual material to explore, analyse and assess the ways in which meaning about individual and community identity and cultural perspectives is shaped in and through texts. 

Starting with the poet 

Listen to what the poet has to say about why he is a poet: 

‘So why have I turned to poetry to publicly explore this [deaf identity]? Because poems are careful things—if done well, every sound and word has something to carry. My poems are Deaf poems because they are defiant in how they take up space on the page, not searching for loss, but for something gained ... I think that what my parents respected about poetry was its ability to communicate the otherwise unsayable; becoming a poet is my attempt to achieve a power equal to digital hearing aids.’
From The Poetry Foundation 

Also consider the impact and importance of the epigraph at the beginning of the collection.

‘There is no telling what language is inside the body.’ American poet Robin Coste Lewis

For each poem stand back and ask how the language of that poem explores individual identity and what does it say about culturally connected groups?

In what ways does each poem 

• affirm
• reveal
• ignore
• challenge
• disrupt
• shape or 
• question prevailing assumptions and beliefs about yourself, individuals and culturally connected groups.

Also consider the impact texts have in shaping individuals’ and communities’ sense of identity. How do the poems shape a sense of identity for individuals and communities?

Looking at ‘Echo’

Listen to Raymond Antrobus read ‘Echo’ recorded on Sept 13 2024

‘Echo’ is a five poem sequence which explore the poet’s diagnosis of deafness and the very nature of language. 

Students could:

• Look out for echoes of the focus area Language, culture and identity and consider how closely this poem explores all three, understanding that there is a very strong and close Deaf community with its own culture and sense of identity.
• Listen several times to the poem read aloud by the poet
• Consider the evocative title which resonates throughout the poem and look for synonyms e.g. reverberate, resound
• Discuss why this is such an apt title for a d/Deaf poet
• Research intertextuality as a feature of this poem
  • Explore the references to other poets such as Larkin, Rilke and Kei Miller a Jamaican poet: Antrobus says “I thought about Rilke whose Duino Elegies open on a kind of pleading: ‘Who, if I cried out would hear me among the hierarchy of angels.’ I also thought of Phillip Larkins’ poem ‘Church Going,’ where the church is described as a ‘tense, musty, unignorable silence’”
  • Explore the reference to Gaudi’s cathedral Sagrada Familia (Holy Family) in Barcelona Spain:(Antrobus explains that when he listened to the audio guide there, he was directed to stand under the roof and shout or sing and listen to how the ‘divine’ sound moves, and he pondered whether because he could only hear it with artificial aids would it be less divine?
  • Explore the references to Salacia, the Roman goodness of saltwater, to Babylon and its babble and to Echo, a nymph in Greek mythology
  • In groups discuss your response to section three when the poet is clearing out his father’s belonging after his death, and finds a smudged green label Raymond Speaking on the cassette 
        I play the tape in his vintage cassette player
        and hear my two-year-old voice chanting my name, Antrob,
         and Dad’s laughter crackling in the background,
         not knowing I couldn’t hear the word “bus”
         and wouldn’t until I got my hearing aids.
         Now I sit here listening to the space of deafness—
        Antrob, Antrob, Antrob
• Discuss in groups the impact of using the Lego blocks as symbols of learning and discovery in section five when the poet says 
      And no one knew what I was missing
      until a doctor gave me a handful of Lego
      and said to put a brick on the table
      every time I heard a sound.
      After the test I still held enough bricks in my hand to build a house and call it my sanctuary…
• Report to the class from your group about how different types of repetition e.g. What? open up the poem to analyse the qualities of spoken language. Consider what other ways the poet uses language devices to shape his meaning.

Now listen to, and explore, the other poems in the suite: ‘Jamaican British’, ‘Ode to My Hair’, ‘Dear Hearing World’, ‘The Ghost of Laura Bridgman Warns Helen Keller About Fame’, ‘Dr Marigold Reevaluated’, ‘To Sweeten Bitter’. Consider what they share with ‘Echo’ and how they are different. 

Essay Task: How does Raymond Antrobus use language and image to explore diverse cultures and identities in his poem ‘Echo’? 

Possible tasks

Teaching these poems cannot commence until Term 4 2026 and will be first examined in 2027.

Relevant details in relation to the new NSW English Stage 6 HSC syllabus

Teaching these poems cannot commence until Term 4 2026 and will be first examined in 2027.

There are requirements for particular types of texts to be selected from the prescribed texts list for different courses. Great care must be taken in selecting a pathway of texts that meets all the requirements.

In the Standard English course students are required to closely study 3 prescribed texts, with ONE drawn from each of the following categories:

• prose fiction
• poetry
• drama OR film OR media OR nonfiction.

The suite of poems from The Perseverance by Raymond Antrobus includes a range of cultural, social and gender perspectives.

Possible pathways for HSC Standard English course