Signs, Music
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Pan Macmillan
Published:12th Sep '24
£10.99
This title is due to be published on 12th September, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
‘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 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's] poetry transcends speech, sound, silence, words – and what we are left with, when we close this astonishing book, is the vibration of the emotion on the blank page * i newspaper *
Raymond Antrobus is as searching a poet as you're likely to find writing today -- Kaveh Akbar, author of Pilgrim Bell and MARTYR!
ISBN: 9781035020850
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
80 pages