Signs, Music
English
By (author): Raymond Antrobus
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 poets lines [to] lead towards my father (again!).
Charting the ways parenthood disrupts the poets 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 Britains 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.