Signs, Music, 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.
 
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 9781035020850
Number of pages: 96
Weight: 134 g
Dimensions: 196 x 154 x 8 mm