Raymond Antrobus: Signs, Music

‘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 poetic sequences about imminent fatherhood and the birth of a child, Signs, Music is a profound 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!)’.

This event also features readings from poets Deanna Rodger and Zaffar Kunial.

Raymond Antrobus was born in Hackney to an English mother and Jamaican father. He is the author of To Sweeten Bitter, The Perseverance, All The Names Given and the children’s picture books Can Bears Ski? and Terrible Horses. A number of his poems were added to the UK’s GCSE syllabus in 2022.

Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a poet, writer and artist whose work has appeared widely in publications including the London Review of Books, LitHub and The Atlantic. She is the winner of an Eric Gregory Award, and her critically acclaimed debut poetry book, Quiet, won the Folio Prize for Poetry and the John Pollard Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize.