stdClass Object
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    [ID] => 19039
    [post_author] => 6
    [post_date] => 2018-06-27 09:00:46
    [post_date_gmt] => 2018-06-27 09:00:46
    [post_content] => My mirth can laugh and talk, but cannot sing;
My grief finds harmonies in everything 
     – James Thomson

And what comes out if it isn’t the wires
dad welds to his homemade sound system
which I accidently knock loose
while he is recording Talk-Over dubs, killing
the bass, flattening the mood and his muses
making dad blow his fuses and beat me.
It wasn’t my fault, the things he made
could be undone so easily –
and we would keep losing connection.
But I praise my dad’s mechanical hands –
even though he couldn’t fix my deafness
I channel him. My sound system plays
on Father’s Day in Manor Park Cemetery
where I find his grave, and for the first time
see his middle name Osbert, derived from Old English
meaning God, and Bright. Which may have
been a way to bleach him, darkest
of his five brothers, the only one sent away
from the country to live uptown
with his light skin aunt. She protected him
from police who didn’t believe he belonged
unless they heard his English,
which was smooth as some uptown roads.
His aunt loved him and taught him
to recite Wordsworth and Coleridge – rhythms
that wouldn’t save him. He would become
Rasta and never tell a soul about the name
that undid his blackness. It is his grave
that tells me the name his black
body, even in death, could not move or mute.
    [post_title] => Sound Machine
    [post_excerpt] => 
    [post_status] => publish
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    [post_name] => sound-machine
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    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2019-09-26 11:35:20
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2019-09-26 11:35:20
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    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => http://poems.poetrysociety.org.uk/?post_type=poems&p=19039
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    [post_type] => poems
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        (
            [wpcf-published-in] => The Poetry Review
            [wpcf-date-published] => The Poetry Review, spring issue, 2017.
            [wpcf-summary-description] => This poem was first published in the spring 2017 issue of The Poetry Review, 107:1,  and won the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize judged by Ocean Vuong.



Judge's comments
"It was Raymond Antrobus’s ‘Sound Machine’ that kept snagging me back to its emotionally textured and sonically charged wordscape. The poem gyrates through interrogations of grief and ancestry twinned with a brooded meditation on masculinity and selfhood, the gifts and burdens we inherit, despite ourselves, from our fathers. "
            [wpcf-rights-information] => 
            [wpcf-poem-award] => Winner, Geoffrey Dearmer Prize 2017
            [wpcf_pr_belongs] => 
        )

    [poet_data] => stdClass Object
        (
            [ID] => 19041
            [forename] => 
            [surname] => 
            [title] => Raymond Antrobus
            [slug] => raymond-antrobus
            [content] => Raymond Antrobus is a Hackney-born British Jamaican poet, educator, editor and curator of the Chill Pill event series. His pamphlet, To Sweeten Bitter (2017), is published by Out-Spoken Press and debut collection The Perseverance was the winner of the Ted Hughes Award in 2018. He is a Complete Works III fellow and one of the world’s first recipients of an MA in Spoken Word education (Goldsmiths, University of London). He is also one of three current recipients of the Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. His poem, ‘Sound Machine’, first published in The Poetry Review, 107:1, Spring 2017, was the winner of the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize 2017, judged by Ocean Vuong. In 2019 he became the first ever poet to be awarded the Rathbone Folio Prize for best work of literature in any genre. In 2019 he is a judge of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award.
        )

)

stdClass Object
(
    [ID] => 19041
    [forename] => 
    [surname] => 
    [title] => Raymond Antrobus
    [slug] => raymond-antrobus
    [content] => Raymond Antrobus is a Hackney-born British Jamaican poet, educator, editor and curator of the Chill Pill event series. His pamphlet, To Sweeten Bitter (2017), is published by Out-Spoken Press and debut collection The Perseverance was the winner of the Ted Hughes Award in 2018. He is a Complete Works III fellow and one of the world’s first recipients of an MA in Spoken Word education (Goldsmiths, University of London). He is also one of three current recipients of the Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. His poem, ‘Sound Machine’, first published in The Poetry Review, 107:1, Spring 2017, was the winner of the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize 2017, judged by Ocean Vuong. In 2019 he became the first ever poet to be awarded the Rathbone Folio Prize for best work of literature in any genre. In 2019 he is a judge of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award.
)