Signs, Music

Raymond Antrobus
(Picador Poetry, 2024); pbk, £10.99

Much has been written more recently about new mothers, laughed at, or conspiratorially grimaced with, in face-to-face encounters in various post-natal and toddler groups. And because pregnancy and childbirth are necessarily bodily states, I have often wondered about how fathers imagine themselves into a relationship with the unborn or new born baby. It is thus so heartening to have a poetry collection willing to be emotionally candid regarding the joys and travails of being new at fatherhood.

In Signs, Music, small acts figure large; the parent-child connection is made real through small, quotidian gestures such as singing to his unborn child through the walls of his partner’s belly, staring at other fathers carrying babies strapped to them, wondering about their lives. Vulnerability is evident in paternal worries about stillbirth and cot deaths, and fears about how the world might receive the narrator’s black son given his own experiences growing up as a black boy…

(to read the full review, click HERE.)