The new fatherdidn’t want to be called fatherso he raised the bridge to protect the bordersof fatherhood. He shouted over the water.The harshness of his voice was hereditary.Why is he a monument when he could bea yoga stretch, an open hand, a nameover another name?There can be no dispensationfor the father. He’s gone through life pretendingit was the house shivering and not his father.His father never said he wantedto be his father and here he is, wantingto be his father. He wants to be warmas midnight cups and runningcar engines and the manin Freetown who rowed him across the riverand asked him to name the countrieshe’d been to, before he told himhe’d never been anywherebut motherland, fatherland. Amen. •I hold my son in a fluorescent corridor, a floatyfatherland, a new field of focus. •Fatherland! he said,when he meant a lakeof delirium. •
signs, music (excerpt)
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- February 4, 2025
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An excerpt from Signs, Music: by Raymond Antrobus.
Published by Tin House on September 17, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Raymond Antrobus.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

Lily Bertrand Webb
Raymond Antrobus is a poet and writer from London. He is the author of To Sweeten Bitter (Out-Spoken Press) and The Perseverance (Penned In The Margins). Raymond’s children’s picture book, Can Bears Ski?, illustrated by Polly Dunbar, was published by Walker Books in 2021 and his poetry collection, All the Names Given, was published by Picador in 2021.
The Perseverance won the Rathbones Folio Prize, the Ted Hughes Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award in 2019. It was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize, the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Jhalak Prize and the Michael Murphy Prize. It was also named the Poetry Book Society’s ‘Winter Choice’, Guardian Poetry Book of the Year, Sunday Times Poetry Book of the Year and Poetry School Book of the Year.
His poetry collection, Signs, Music, about fatherhood and masculinity, was published in 2024 by Picador in the UK and Tin House in the US, and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. His debut non-fiction work, The Quiet Ear: An Investigation of Missing Sound will be published by W&N in the UK and Hogarth in the US in spring 2025.
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.
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