Description

SHORTLISTED FOR THE T.S. ELIOT PRIZE FOR POETRY
POETRY BOOK SOCIETY CHOICE

‘I became fatherless at 26 and a father
at 35 and whenever I look out

the living room window I feel myself
become 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.

‘This is transformative writing creating a new cultural landscape. Antrobus makes us hear between the lines through poems well-crafted with emotional intelligence’ – Linton Kwesi Johnson, Mark Oakley and Clare Shaw, judges of the 2018 Ted Hughes Prize.

Publisher Review

Tender . . . an unflinching and impactful look at the emotoinal dissonances of new parenthood * Publishers Weekly * 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!