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Signs, Music

by Raymond Antrobus

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Narrator Raymond Antrobus

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Length 53 minutes

Language English

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Summary
About the author
About the narrator

‘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.

Poetry

Raymond Antrobus was born in London, Hackney to an English mother and Jamaican father. He is the author of To Sweeten Bitter (2017, Out-Spoken Press), The Perseverance (2018, Penned In The Margins / Tin House) All The Names Given (2021, Picador / Tin House) and the children's picture book Can Bears Ski? (2020, Walkers Books) 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.