Poem of the week: The Silent Space by Adrian Rice

The Silent Space

Given a choice by the gentleman, my third-grader son
elected to have me join him in the soundproofed room
to take his hearing test. Shy-seeming to the audiologist
his mother and I knew him better than that,
how he wasn’t truly shy so much as unimpressed
with common ceremony. We were wholeheartedly
wrong, it appeared, for since he had hardly
heard much in one ear for all of his young life
he’d been innocently distanced by such loss,
sending antisocial signals he wasn’t guilty of.

I sat behind him in the vaulty booth, sworn to quiet,
kindly ordered to keep really still: just there for him in
silent support, pretending to be parentally composed.
I couldn’t hear the doctor’s words when he began the test
from behind the cloudy one-way mirror that hid his face,
the inter-booth exchange between their headphoned selves,
for my boy to listen to and show that he had caught
the words the doctor threw. He sat there motionless,
concentrated, as grown up as he always was when faced
with the new that those much older would struggle with.

Related: Poem of the week: from The War Prayer by Mark Twain

I couldn’t hear the words, only he could seek their sound,
but knew when they were found by how he’d physically
respond, raising his hand casually like a cattle bidder
when a word came through, or thumbing a button
when a word barge docked, not sank, along his ear canal.
Sometimes he spoke in answer to the mystery words,
sending back those he’d been asked to repeat: some wrong
no doubt, like errant echoes, some like perfect rhymes,
but all were simple words now solemnly renewed,
words and phrases rinsed of the ordinariness of daily use

in the inner sanctum hush of that listening room:
words like house, home, sailboat, mother, laughter,
and sunshine, doctor, flavour, good, past, and before.
Icecream, I remember, raised and left a ripple of a smile
and a sneaky lifting of eyes to meet with mine.
I felt involved but helpless, hovering in that room,
unable to lend him my ears, though given age I’m
unsure whether mine would catch the words’ drift better.
Which reminded me of sitting in a virtual online room
with my Irish son, listening to the story of his latest poem,

to another tale of sailing solo into the silent space
to bring back messages from behind the vaulted veil;
and how I always will him on to have the ears to find them:
just sitting with him, listening in, only seeing how it’s going
by those words he stitches into each carefully crafted verse;
for as he now knows, words that make poems are inaudible
to anyone except those chosen to receive their cargoed charge.
Test was over. Conductive hearing issues, the spoken diagnosis.
We headed home with lollipops and stickers to tell his mother.
Listening well to her, our son’s now learning how to live with loss.

This poem, from the newly published collection by Adrian Rice, The Chances of Harm, recounts his young son Micah’s audiological investigation, and expands into connection with the “silent space” of a poem. Ultimately, it introduces us to Matthew, the child of Rice’s earlier marriage. Matthew is also a poet; he published his first collection, The Last Weather Observer, in 2021, and his second collection will be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions next year, as part of the publisher’s brand new poetry list.

In the first line, “gentleman” stands out as an old-fashioned parental courtesy-word. It suggests a nudge to a possibly hesitant son to make the choice, and is a moment where we hear the father’s voice from outside the poem. The reference to “my boy” in verse two is another, with perhaps a further echo later on: “We headed home with stickers and lollipops to tell his mother.” The poem testifies to a determination to break the imposed silence during the test, and reconstruct the occasion through the difficult inter-circuitry of figurative poem and straightforward anecdote.

There’s a fine portrait in the first verse of the boy known by his mother and father as not “truly shy so much as unimpressed / with common ceremony”. This early stage in the story also makes room for a pain that includes misunderstanding and regret; the son had been “innocently distanced” by his undiagnosed conductive hearing loss, “sending antisocial signals he wasn’t guilty of”. Rice goes on to explore his own possibly similar sense of isolation in the “vaulty booth” of the test, where he can hear nothing, and has to read his son’s body-language to know whether a word was audible or not. If he hears the word, the boy raises his hand “casually, like a cattle bidder”. That image stands out with particular freshness. Eventually, the test-words are shared, and they prove an interesting mixture: they include “home” and “mother” but some, such as “sailboat” and “past”, may signify distance. They make a convincing path to the encounter between the poet and his “Irish son”.

Technically, the poem favours the horizontal of flowing, metre-free, easily spoken lines, which are nevertheless marshalled into 10-line vertical structures. An emphasis on “room” suggests home and its various kinds of testing: as a synonym with “stanza”, it may allude to the formalism of Rice’s inherited Northern Irish tradition. When, in verse three, the end-word, “sound” chimes unexpectedly with “found” in the next line, it might be a teasing but not unadmiring reference to the “perfect rhymes” often sought in that tradition. Fitting narratorial and poetic manners together, the poet from north Belfast, now resettled in Hickory, North Carolina, fascinatingly reveals the verbal styles of his different homes.