Signs, Music

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

Reading Raymond Antrobus’ new collection, Signs, Music, made me remember my pregnancy and the arrival of my baby daughter: wonderment at seeing a baby’s foot shape appearing on the skin of my ballooning stomach (this thing that is in me but not me is alive); steadying my nerves by treating my unborn baby as a confidant before an important lecture (let’s go get them girl, you and I); scanning the faces of mixed-race babies to imagine what mine would look like (not like me nor her father); trying out names (no, not Caitlin nor Callum). The months after her birth upended my ordered, professional life; the sleep deprivation that turned my waking hours into hallucinatory dreams was topped by my utter helplessness and despair over what to do with her endless crying and posseting (what does she want? What am I doing so wrong?). And then there was the ever-present fear about cot death, which saw me rushing to her cot to hear if she was breathing, to peer at her sleeping form for the rise and fall of her chest (oh, the vice-like fear around your heart). But all of these maternal anxieties were mitigated by the absurd joy at the curl of her bow legs, or marvelling at her made-up new words when she smiled and began to talk. Raymond Antrobus does all of this and more in Signs, Music but from the perspective of a new father.

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. ‘The world is too much with us’, that line from William Wordsworth, is given a new twist amidst inequalities and unbelonging; disquiet registers in quick-fire pistol shot interrogations, alarmingly bigger with each change in font size:

The bond between fathers and sons, the subject of the collection, can’t be taken for granted but needs to be enacted; names must be made real, grown into. The collection’s first half, ‘Naming’, allows a back-to-the-future manoeuvre where the speaker’s extended exploration of relationship with his own father feeds into his own concerns about his future relationship with his son. The father-son relationship previously is depicted as complex: drunken episodes, temper explosions but also tenderness; the speaker’s love of sound and music is connected with the songs his father sings to him, his father’s musicality and ‘vague poetic-sounding sayings.’ Playing football together, despite injury, is testament to love and companionship on both sides,

I knew
about his bad toes.

When he chose
to tap the ball

With his foot
I flinched

felt his pain roll towards me.

Yet the past is so much with us, and there are anxious speculations about the narrator’s future relationship with his son, given all the situations that might mess up a boy’s life:

                             Once
I too parade that thought of fuck
family fuck growing up fuck

What I might become, fuck
vanishing into shapes I’ll never

See myself in.

If, as he observes, ‘I modelled parts of myself on his sensibilities -- /flaws, oppression and vanities’, what of his young son? Vampires in film who can see their own reflections in bring home fear, ‘They can’t unsee how they are seen/ after all their years coffined in the dark.’

Poems in the second half, ‘New Father’, sees the narrator less as the young boy of the past, and more as the adult poet feeling the pressure of the new role. The world expands accordingly. So encounters with privilege and wealth set in motion some reflective poems about class and under-privilege; but the temptation to envy others is met with a realisation about fool’s gold,

                This is a different
economy.
                My own child
biting down
                on his new
fingers
               on his new hand,
perhaps like a pirate
               bites a gold coin
 to see
               if it’s real.

The dinner conversation with ‘the banker/and the successful novelist’ ends with a ‘nod to both’  and the realisation ‘that I can handle it’.

Signs, Music is full of small ordinary domestic details—walking through a park, noticing the natural world and pointing out what is seen, imagining stories for the folk passed by on these excursions, looking outside through the bedroom window, bath time, sleep deprivation, and suggestions of domestic rows and arguments, and more. All of these small everyday situations and things matter and are given prominence, and they are rendered with humour too, for example, hoping his baby son doesn’t pee when sharing a bath together. These moments become almost charged ‘moments of being’ to use Virginia Woolf’s phrase. In a poem which engages with Wordsworth, the speaker remarks, ‘noticing is a small and quiet way to being/moving away from the passive crowd.’  

Though the ‘New Father’ half contains more formal poems such as a villanelle bird poem, the collection is mostly made up of airy, short poetic fragments, and fluid poems with lots of white spaces and breaks between each. Its predominantly present tense narration has the effect of letting readers into the moment of thinking, walking, singing and signing with the poem’s narrator. Signs, Music is attentive to voice and speech, to cadence and dialogue, and also thought expressed as a voice in spoken in one’s head. Relatively simple diction, a strong rhythm and the use of repetition also make performativity apparent on the page in syntax and sentence structure. Poetics and presentation thus make the theme material in Signs, Music real. Given Antrobus’s hearing difficulties, there are poems (and illustrations) which address sounds and deafness specifically, and they come together in the final poem which sees his young son signing ‘music’ and ‘bird’. Much like Wordsworth’s elevation of the child, the baby boy becomes the father of man, and the father learns from the child a ‘concrete path’ of hopefulness:

the dance of what can be done with
muscles in the legs and arms and face,

it seems the earth is not here for us
but with us. And how would we get from

one place to another without the kindness
of paths, of seeding and mowing.

The newborn is rendered the living emblem of signs and music. Ordinary quietness becomes a transformative virtue. Signs, Music is an altogether emotionally enriching, open-handed and open-hearted collection towards a world transformed by newness, and suffused with love and renewal. And such dreams for a hopeful future are shared, of course, by both sexes.