EBOOK
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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. 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
Tender. . . . Deeply felt.-Publishers Weekly
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.-Kevin Young, The New Yorker Poetry Podcast
Intimate. . . . This book moves with deceptive directness and ease, giving way to a significant record of lyric inquiry.-Lit Hub, A Best Poetry Collection of September
Touching.-Shelf Awareness
Antrobus captures ordinary life with an episodic, unconstrained energy.-The Guardian
Quietly and sincerely circles fatherhood in every language possible, including the titular signs and music.-Poetry Northwest
Antrobus' lyrical verse moves like a delicate but unflinching whisper, guiding readers through a journey that is deeply personal yet universally resonant.-Adroit Journal
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, 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
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
"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. 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
Tender. . . . Deeply felt.-Publishers Weekly
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.-Kevin Young, The New Yorker Poetry Podcast
Intimate. . . . This book moves with deceptive directness and ease, giving way to a significant record of lyric inquiry.-Lit Hub, A Best Poetry Collection of September
Touching.-Shelf Awareness
Antrobus captures ordinary life with an episodic, unconstrained energy.-The Guardian
Quietly and sincerely circles fatherhood in every language possible, including the titular signs and music.-Poetry Northwest
Antrobus' lyrical verse moves like a delicate but unflinching whisper, guiding readers through a journey that is deeply personal yet universally resonant.-Adroit Journal
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, 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
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