An astounding new collection from the author of the T.S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted All The Names Given, Signs, Music is a beautiful series of lyric sequences about masculinity and fatherhood.
An astounding collection from the author of the T.S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted All The Names Given, Signs, Music is a beautiful series of lyric sequences about masculinity and fatherhood.
'I became fatherless at 26 and a fatherat 35 and whenever I look outthe living room window I feel myselfbecome the child left alone in the house'Centred around two lyric poems on imminent fatherhood and the birth of a child, Signs, Music is a book about masculinity, fatherhood, and love. The speaker, looking backwards to his late father and forwards to his new son, prepares to become a parent for the first time. Meditating on the cognitive and emotional dissonances between the 'hypothetical' and the 'real' of becoming a father, this irreversible transition causes the poet's 'lines [to] lead towards my father (again!)'.Charting the ways parenthood disrupts the poet's sense of self, and how the pain of the past triggers fears of 'fatherly failure', Signs, Music is a staggeringly profound collection from one of Britain's most adept poets writing today.
Antrobus captures ordinary life with an episodic, unconstrained energy -- Kit Fan, The Guardian
Tender . . . an unflinching and impactful look at the emotoinal dissonances of new parenthood Publishers Weekly
It’s hard to explain how much parenting can change a person, but Antrobus succeeds . . . Here is a beautiful mapping of a journey of this life that becomes this life in all of its anaphoric radiance. Each letter in these poems is bursting at the seams. -- Victoria Chang, author of With My Back to the World
Unlike any poetry about becoming a father I've read . . . This is a book of slow seeing which achieves a level of genuine intimacy -- Will Harris, author of RENDANG and Brother Poem
His poems manage to look simultaneously backwards and forwards, into the past and the future – at who we were, who we are and who we hope to be -- Joe Dunthorne, author of O Positive
[Raymond Antrobus's] poetry transcends speech, sound, silence, words – and what we are left with, when we close this astonishing book, is the vibration of the emotion on the blank page i newspaper
Raymond Antrobus is as searching a poet as you're likely to find writing today -- Kaveh Akbar, author of Pilgrim Bell and Martyr!
Signs, Music wades devotedly through weathers of joy, grief, wonderment and terror—all of which arise as fleetingly on the page as they do in the throes of new parenthood. Vulnerable and hopeful, though never expectant of certainty or utopia, Signs, Music is a prayer for a world that might yet look tenderly upon young black life -- Victoria Adukwei Bulley, author of Quiet
Raymond Antrobus was born in London, Hackney to an English mother and Jamaican father. He is the author of To Sweeten Bitter (2017, Out-Spoken Press), The Perseverance (2018, Penned In The Margins / Tin House) All The Names Given (2021, Picador / Tin House) and the children's picture book Can Bears Ski? (2020, Walkers Books) A number of his poems were added to the UK's GCSE syllabus in 2022. The BBC Radio 4 documentary Inventions In Sound, which accompanies All The Names Given, was produced by Falling Tree Productions and won a Best Documentary Award at the 2021 Third Coast International Audio Festival.
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