Raymond Antrobus is not the first poet in his family: on his mother’s side, he is descended from Thomas Gray, whose most famous poem, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751), is filled with sounds – lowing cows, the droning of a beetle in flight, twittering swallows and a crowing cock among them. These are the noises that, if he’s not wearing hearing aids, might escape Antrobus, who was born with what he often characterises as “missing sound” in the upper and lower registers: a whistling kettle or a doorbell disappears at one end, while at the other, syllables might get elided, rendering, for example, “suspicious” as “spacious” – words with problematically different meanings.

If this idea of a continuum of sound seems straightforward, as Antrobus points out in this compact, powerful exploration of his experience, it is often hard to explain to those who understand deafness as an inability to hear anything. Many imagine deaf people existing entirely in silence, cut off from communication with the hearing world except through lip-reading, sign language and equipment. For Antrobus, this aspect of “audism” can be as effortful to navigate as conversations and soundscapes in which he uses practised strategies to compensate for what his ears do not pick up.

Hearing loss is not the only context in which he is expected to adapt to others’ version of the world. Visiting the Cheshire village of Antrobus – its name derived from the Norman-French “entre-bois”, or “between woods”– he meets a farmer who assumes, because of the colour of his skin, that he is descended from a slave-owning baronet, although it is his mother’s family who bears the name rather than his Jamaican-born father’s. The encounter ends with him standing in a country churchyard with thoughts of the English working-classes and the enslaved plantation workers “turning, churning, burning, all of it inside the blood pumping in my ears”. It joins a long line of moments in which his identity as a mixed Black British person with a disability that is not always easy to define is subject to projection and appropriation.

Antrobus interlaces episodes from his own life with accounts of pioneering teachers of the deaf, and of artists such as poet David Wright, who lost his hearing as a child and who, Antrobus believes, internalised his parents’ anxieties and consequently lived his life with a degree of shame he finds it easy to recognise. As a child, Antrobus often wished away his deafness and kept capital-D Deaf culture at arm’s length, leaving off his hearing aids and throwing himself into activities such as competitive swimming, in which his hearing peers would also find themselves in a world of distorted sound.

In the Deaf community, he discovered, he could feel not deaf enough; in the hearing world, he could just about pass if he didn’t use the sign language that he caught other students mocking as his deaf schoolmates walked to class. At anger-management classes, he listened to his mother’s stories about his episodes of frustrated lashing out and heard them “less like someone trying to have an open conversation and more like an attack, an accusation, and the fury that was erupting in my teenage brain felt wrong, a source of my own shame”. As his mother attempted to help, his father, Seymour, bought him a punchbag; Antrobus hit it so hard, he sprained his wrist.

Antrobus is understandably wary of salvation narratives, and his introduction to the world of poetry is also presented as difficult. At spoken-word nights, he would have to position himself carefully so as not be overwhelmed by creaking staircases or applause, and, as an audience member, was once agonisingly singled out by a poet for vocalising his own appreciation too loudly. Nonetheless, he began to realise that poetry “held and honoured many of my own burdens and truths” and, perhaps most significantly, gave him a way to integrate his experiences and identities with one another. What emerges most consistently from this moving book is his need to be met on his own terms, in a territory that he is given the freedom to map for himself.

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