Signs, Music

In Signs, Music, Raymond Antrobus reflects on the profound transition into fatherhood, looking forward to the birth of his son and back to the absence of his own father. Structured around two central lyric sequences—Towards Naming and The New Father—the collection explores masculinity, memory, and love with unflinching tenderness.

Meditating on the emotional distance between the hypothetical and the real, Antrobus writes through the irreversible shift of becoming a parent. In poems that reach toward his father “again,” he contends with the past while forging a new understanding of the self, intimacy, and responsibility.

This is poetry that charts disruption—how the experience of parenthood reframes the poet’s identity, and how the echoes of grief complicate love. The result is a staggeringly intimate and sonically rich collection from one of Britain’s most resonant literary voices.