{"id":390877,"date":"2025-09-02T03:24:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-02T03:24:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/390877\/"},"modified":"2025-09-02T03:24:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-02T03:24:11","slug":"the-quiet-ear-an-investigation-of-missing-sound-deafness-not-as-deficit-but-a-distinctive-mode-of-relating-to-the-world-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/390877\/","title":{"rendered":"The Quiet Ear – An Investigation of Missing Sound: Deafness not as deficit, but a distinctive mode of relating to the world \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Quiet Ear: An Investigation of Missing Sound<\/strong> <\/p>\n

Author:<\/strong> Raymond Antrobus <\/p>\n

ISBN-13:<\/strong> 9781399619660\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Publisher:<\/strong> Hogarth<\/p>\n

Guideline Price:<\/strong> \u00a316.99<\/p>\n

What does it truly mean to live and belong in a world dominated by sound? This profound question echoes throughout The Quiet Ear, where award-winning poet Raymond Antrobus crafts a deeply intimate, expansive, and genre-defying meditation on deafness, identity, and communication. This is not merely a memoir; it is a poetic reckoning with language, racial and cultural belonging, grief, masculinity, and the very nature of listening. Every page pulses with vulnerability and insight, urging readers to reconsider their assumptions about ability, expression and voice.<\/p>\n

From the outset, Antrobus refuses to frame deafness as a deficit. Instead, he reclaims it as a way of knowing, a distinctive mode of sensing and relating to the world. Whether walking with his son in the English countryside naming birds, tracing his lineage to the poet Thomas Gray, or uncovering ties to Antrobus village in Cheshire \u2013 a name derived from the Norman-French entre-bois, meaning \u201cbetween (or within) the woods\u201d, \u2013 and to Caribbean plantations owned by a slave-trading ancestor, Antrobus reveals the deep richness found by those who listen differently. He dismantles the myths around \u201chearing loss\u201d and reclaims deafness as a cultural, linguistic and poetic space. Along the way, he honours overlooked deaf poets and thinkers such as David Wright and Dorothy Miles.<\/p>\n

Antrobus\u2019s early life in Hackney schools is marked by both exclusion and quiet resilience. We meet Renata, the patient, precise language specialist who worked with him in private sessions, \u201cfilling holes\u201d in his language, teaching him how to hear with his eyes, and gently decoding the hidden sounds of English spelling. These sessions, held away from other pupils, could have reinforced a sense of difference; instead, they became spaces of empowerment, where the young Antrobus learned to navigate a hearing world without surrendering his own way of processing language. <\/p>\n

The memoir also reveals moments where Antrobus is mistaken, dismissed, or excluded, not only because he is deaf, but also because of his accent, his skin, and his silence. One of the most powerful threads in the book is Antrobus\u2019s exploration of his Jamaican-British identity as a deaf man. He captures the layered weight of racial and cultural displacement: being seen as \u201cnot Jamaican enough\u201d in Jamaica, and being marginalised in the UK by both the hearing world and white Britishness. These tense and painful moments are often laced with humour or quiet resistance.<\/p>\n

While Antrobus does not hear certain high-frequency sounds, he is not shut out from sound altogether; rather, he tunes in differently. His early relationship with music is deeply personal. Artists including Tupac, Leonard Cohen and Nina Simone mattered to him not only for their rhythm or tone, but for the precision and emotional depth of their words. This profound engagement with language and meaning clearly informs and underpins his poetic sensibility, illuminating how these early musical influences helped shape his distinctive voice as both poet and writer. Later, in open-mic nights and poetry cafes, he begins to claim his own voice, negotiating the challenges of sound in noisy venues and the intimate act of performing for a live audience. These scenes are as much about belonging as they are about art.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0The Last Sounds: how writing my novel helped me accept my own deafnessOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

The relationship with and loss of his father are rendered with aching honesty, shadowed by violence and alcoholism. Antrobus mourns not only the man, but the missed conversations and the limits of language that created distance between them. In counterpoint, the passages about his young son are luminous with patience and play. When his child invents new words or mishears, Antrobus offers companionship rather than correction, recognising in his son\u2019s frustrations a mirror of his own panicky sensitivity to misunderstanding. The result is a moving reflection on inheritance: what a deaf father can pass to a hearing child, and how \u201cdeaf gain\u201d \u2013 the insights and strengths forged in living between the hearing and deaf worlds \u2013 can be shared across that difference.<\/p>\n

Though written in prose, the book is unmistakably the work of a poet. Antrobus writes with exquisite rhythm and restraint, blending anecdote, essay, memory and meditation. The non-linear chapters mirror the fluidity of memory and sensory experience. Incorporating sign language, poetry, dialogue and fragments, he resists traditional narrative form to create an immersive, emotionally profound reading experience.<\/p>\n

The Quiet Ear is a moving and essential work. Raymond Antrobus challenges how we understand sound, identity and expression, not by eliciting pity or offering easy answers, but by inviting us into a deeper, more empathetic kind of listening. In a world saturated with noise, this book is a quiet revolution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Quiet Ear: An Investigation of Missing Sound Author: Raymond Antrobus ISBN-13: 9781399619660\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Publisher: Hogarth Guideline Price: \u00a316.99…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":390878,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3938],"tags":[3444,77,135471,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-390877","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-raymond-antrobus","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115132567855292963","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=390877"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390877\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/390878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=390877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=390877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=390877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}