Signs Music

<p><b>SHORTLISTED FOR THE T.S. ELIOT PRIZE FOR POETRY<br>POETRY BOOK SOCIETY CHOICE<br><br><i>‘I became fatherless at 26 and a father</i></b><br><b><i>at 35 and whenever I look out</i></b><br><br><b><i>the living room window I feel myself</i></b><br><b><i>become the child left alone in the house’</i></b><br><br>Centred around two lyric poems on imminent fatherhood and the birth of a child, <i>Signs</i>, 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!)’.<br><br>Charting the ways parenthood disrupts the poet’s sense of self, and how the pain of the past triggers fears of ‘fatherly failure’, <i>Signs</i>, Music is a staggeringly profound collection from one of Britain’s most adept poets writing today.<br><br><b>''This is transformative writing creating a new cultural landscape. Antrobus makes us hear between the lines through poems well-crafted with emotional intelligence'' – Linton Kwesi Johnson, Mark Oakley and Clare Shaw, judges of the 2018 Ted Hughes Prize.</b></p>