Signs, Music

By: Raymond Antrobus

Narrated by: Raymond Antrobus

Length: 1 hr and 10 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

©2024 Raymond Antrobus (P)2024 Macmillan Publishers International Limited

Critic reviews

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 is as searching a poet as you're likely to find writing today (Kaveh Akbar, author of Pilgrim Bell and Martyr!)