Synopsis
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.
Details
12 September 2024
9781035020850Reviews
Antrobus captures ordinary life with an episodic, unconstrained energy
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.
Unlike any poetry about becoming a father I've read . . . This is a book of slow seeing which achieves a level of genuine intimacy
