Signs, Music: Poems

by Raymond Antrobus

Overview

 Finalist for the 2024 T. S. Eliot Prize

“Exhilarating.”—Victoria Chang, author of With My Back to the World

“Told with frankness and a masterful wielding of image, Signs, Music is so tenderly rendered that I found myself gasping.”—Shira Erlichman, author of Odes to Lithium

Acclaimed poet Raymond Antrobus returns with Signs, Music, a stunning book of poetry that captures imminent fatherhood and the arrival of a child.

Structured as a two-part sequence poem, Signs, Music explores the before and after of becoming a father with tenderness and care—the cognitive and emotional dissonances between the “hypothetical” and the “real” of fatherhood, the ways our own parents shape the parents we become, and how fraught with emotion, curiosity, and recollection this irreversible transition to fatherhood makes one’s inner landscape.

At once searching and bright, deeply rooted and buoyant, Raymond Antrobus’s Signs, Music is a moving record of the changes and challenges encompassing new parenthood and the inevitable cycles of life, death, birth, renewal, and legacy—a testament to the joy, uncertainty, and incredible love that come with bringing new life into the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781959030799
Publisher:	Tin House Books
Publication date:	09/17/2024
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Raymond Antrobus was born in Hackney, London, to an English mother and Jamaican father. He is the author of To Sweeten Bitter, The Perseverance, and All The Names Given. He was awarded the 2017 Geoffrey Dearmer Prize (judged by Ocean Vuong) for his poem ‘Sound Machine’. In 2019 he became the first poet to be awarded the Rathbones Folio Prize for best work of literature in any genre. Other accolades include the Ted Hughes Award, the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award, and a Sunday Times/University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award. All The Names Given was shortlisted for the Costa Book Award for Poetry and the T. S. Eliot Prize, and several of his poems were added to the GCSE syllabus in 2022. His picture books for children are published by Walker Books (UK) and Candlewick Press (US). Antrobus is an advocate for several D/deaf charities, including DeafKidz International and the National Deaf Children’s Society. He divides his time between England and New Orleans.

Editorial Reviews

"Stunning in its concise clarity, Signs, Music testifies to more than the process of becoming a parent for the first time. It bravely parents author and reader alike through the undeniable parallels between childhood and personhood, father-making and nation-making, while documenting the often hidden and inextricable relationship between violence and tenderness and the brutal necessity of both in the transition from human to caregiver. ‘I keep asking people about children. / How do you keep them alive?’ In his attention to sound, space, and language, Antrobus remains innocent and present, never naive, gently pointing to what we might drop from our language if we want to be remade. This is an incredible follow-up to his previous hat trick of collections."

Marwa Helal

"Told with frankness and a masterful wielding of image, Signs, Music is so tenderly rendered
that I found myself gasping."

Shira Erlichman

"In this honest, witty and humane book, Antrobus brilliantly pins down the before and after of parenthood—and the uncrossable gap between the two. These poems manage to look both backwards and forwards: at who we were, who we are and who we hope to be."

Joe Dunthorne

"What a beautiful poem. . . Both the title and the poem do what I think good poems do, they enact rather than describe. . . . you're in the experience of what I think of as deep connection and pleasure and the ecstatic in the bigger sense."

The New Yorker Poetry Podcast Kevin Young

"Antrobus’ lyrical verse moves like a delicate but unflinching whisper, guiding readers through a journey that is deeply personal yet universally resonant."

Adroit Journal

"Antrobus captures ordinary life with an episodic, unconstrained energy."

The Guardian

"Delicate, simple, gratifying. . . . From Oklahoma to London, Hebrew to Sanskrit, the King James Bible to William Wordsworth’s daffodil poem, the setting and context add entire dimensions to the collection…. I found myself re-reading and basking in my favorite lines."

Associated Press

"Raymond Antrobus's Signs, Music is unlike any poetry about becoming a father I've read. A report from two different countries—the land before birth and afterwards—the strength of this book comes from what it lets stand: half-thoughts, snatched conversations, hard memories. Caffeinated anticipation gives way to exhaustion and wonder, and a darker strain of introspection. The transition from fatherlessness to fatherhood isn't smoothed over, but the son's birth allows for a reconfiguration of relationships—with Antrobus's mother, with the city he grew up in. ‘They’ve always been here,’ he writes. ‘I’m just / moving slowly enough to see them.’ Here is a book of slow seeing which reaches a level of genuine intimacy."

Will Harris

"Reading Raymond Antrobus's Signs, Music, was an exhilarating (re)ride into the wonders and terrors of becoming a new parent. It's hard to explain how much parenting can change a person, but Antrobus succeeds: "I broke up/with announcing my convictions and good news/on the internet I broke up with talking to myself/as if I’m not there I broke up with people-pleasing/and the trembling boundary between life and still life." 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."

Victoria Chang

"Intimate. . . . This book moves with deceptive directness and ease, giving way to a significant record of lyric inquiry."

A Best Poetry Collection of September Lit Hub

"Quietly and sincerely circles fatherhood in every language possible, including the titular signs and music."

Poetry Northwest

"Touching."

Shelf Awareness

"Signs, Music wades devotedly through weathers of joy, grief, wonderment and terror—all of which arise as fleetingly on the page as they do in the throes of new parenthood. Vulnerable and hopeful, though never expectant of certainty or utopia, Signs, Music is a prayer for a world that might yet look tenderly upon young black life."

Victoria Adukwei Bulley

"In this honest, witty and humane book, Antrobus brilliantly pins down the before and after of parenthood—and the uncrossable gap between the two. These poems manage to look both backwards and forwards: at who we were, who we are and who we hope to be."

.Joe Dunthorne