Signs, Music

An astounding collection from the author of the T.S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted All The Names Given, Signs, Music is a beautiful series of lyric sequences about masculinity and fatherhood.

''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.

Autorentext
Raymond Antrobus was born in Hackney, London to an English mother and Jamaican father. He is the author of To Sweeten Bitter, The Perseverance, All The Names Given and the children's picture book Can Bears Ski? A number of his poems were added to the UK's GCSE syllabus in 2022. The BBC Radio 4 documentary Inventions In Sound, which accompanies All The Names Given, was produced by Falling Tree Productions and won a Best Documentary Award at the 2021 Third Coast International Audio Festival.

Zusammenfassung
An astounding collection from the author of the T.S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted All The Names Given, Signs, Music is a beautiful series of lyric sequences about masculinity and fatherhood.