Signs, Music

August 19, 2024
This tender offering from Antrobus (To Sweeten Bitter) delves into new fatherhood, with an ominous, deeply felt question hanging over it: “why have children/ when the world is ending?” The collection is split into the anticipation, and then the reality, of a new baby, as Antrobus lays bare the fears, challenges, and shortcomings every bit as fully as the wave of affection and awe a first child trails in its wake: “The sun is rising and there’s nowhere to hide.” Time is an encroaching presence, as is the apocalyptic political landscape into which the child is to be born: “New dads are marching/ at the climate change protest”; “Freedom, wrote Camille T. Dungy, is measured, in part, by/ the freedom to choose one’s own name.” There is also a sense of coming to terms, particularly after the baby is born, with the poet’s own relationship to fathers and fatherhood (“I became fatherless at 26 and a father/ at 35”; “I thought about leaving/ thinking I need/ myself back need/ to stop the trigger/ of seeing my child/ get what I needed”), and with how one faces the world: “I broke up with righteousness. It sparkled on stage/ but annoyed everyone at the table.” It’s an unflinching and impactful look at the emotional dissonances of new parenthood.