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Signs, Music

Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry

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Signs, Music

By: Raymond Antrobus
Narrated by: Raymond Antrobus
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About this listen

Read by the author, Raymond Antrobus.

‘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.

 Black Creators Death, Grief & Loss European Poetry Themes & Styles World Literature

Critic reviews

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
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
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)
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