British Jamaican poet Raymond Antrobus's intimate third collection, Signs, Music, contrasts the before and after of becoming a father, a transition that prompted Antrobus to reflect on his D/deaf and biracial identities, as well as the death of his own father.
The book contains two parts: "Towards Naming" is set in the final months of Antrobus's partner's pregnancy; "The New Father" gathers vignettes from their son's first year. Each long section incorporates many untitled poems in varying styles that nevertheless flow smoothly, almost like a monologue. Antrobus (All the Names Given) sits in cafés or walks through London, thinking and observing. He addresses his unborn child ("In months you will be here./ It is hypothetical. It is real.") and marvels at his own impending transformation: "Today/ is my last Father's Day as a non-father. This time/ next year I'll be a different creature."
Birds feature metaphorically in multiple poems, including a villanelle toward the end of the collection in which they symbolize the expatriate's disorientation: "The birds sound different in this city." For Antrobus, grief persists but fuels a determination to parent contrarily to his alcoholic father and resist "the trigger/ of seeing my child/ get what I needed." He expresses two fears related to his brown son: that "the world won't trust you/ before you know why" and "that you won't have the patience// to connect with your deaf father." By this volume's touching conclusion, however, the latter has been defused: the collection's title commemorates Antrobus's son's first word in sign language, "music." --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader and blogger at Bookish Beck