Sonnets for Albert: Winner of the T S Eliot Prize 2022

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Now the ‘calling’ is different: in hospital late on (‘P.O.S.C.H. II’) his son thinks of how his father’s absence in Tobago for so long ‘eat up all the joy’, but it is the older man who anxiously wants the attention of the son he neglected so badly in childhood: The poems all concern Joseph's father and his life on Trinidad. They all follow a musical pattern, and slowly begin to take on more abstract qualities as the reader progresses. The best touchstone I have for examining this is a music album, where some poems require repeat playings before they really sink in. What's commendable is that this is an option rather than a requirement; a novice reader like myself can find just as much narrative satisfaction from going over it once as when the poems are re-read. His father, Albert was many things - a sharp dresser, an orator, a builder but he was only an intermittent figure in Anthony's childhood. And it is this absence which made him powerfully present in Joseph's imagination.

All the many versions of that mystery of a life are here: the young ‘player’ of women, the preacher in New York City, the reduced self in his seventh decade. The fragments of memory slowly build up like shards re-forming a broken portrait, facing a confusion rooted in a now unalterable childhood: Writing the poems was a way of “pulling [his father] into place”, he says, and trying to find “the capacity to love him”, which was “a difficult process, because he was not a great father”. Alongside the poems sit images taken by the poet of his father. In one photo, the father’s hand obscures the sun at dusk. Our eyes tell us the father is larger than a star even if our memory tells us this cannot be true. In the poem ‘Jogie Road’, the poet looks up at his father, bloodied like sunset, mining an unreliable memory to make sense of his own conflicted feelings. The relationship between the images and poems is self-ironising. They give the father a new form — a language that is usually designed to validate or challenge the written word. Instead , they obscure the father even more. How do we account for this? In this programme, Anthony explores ideas around fatherhood, masculinity, absence and loss, as he talks to other artists whose art has become a space for interrogating the memory of their father. His work also confirms how time, age, human experience, pain, the ups and downs are materials in the creation of beautiful art.

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In this follow-up, he weighs the impact of being the son of an absent, or mostly absent, father. Though these poems threaten to break under the weight of their emotions, they are always masterfully poised as the stylish man they depict. When Joseph’s father died in 2017, he began to think of writing a selection of sonnets for him, and the result – after bending the form slightly to make the poems more musical – is Sonnets for Albert. As well as poems, the book also contains a number of photographs of Joseph’s father. Caribbean poets are the historians of people

Joseph, who was born in Trinidad and moved to Britain in the late 1980s, is a musician, writer and teacher at King’s College London. I’m delighted to be working with a world-class team at Bloomsbury in ensuring the work of these visionary poets is presented with the grace it demands, a task to which Bloomsbury have proved themselves more than equal. What a time to be alive." I enjoyed the final sets of poems a lot more than the opening ones. It is remarkable how much information Joseph can put into short structures. He paints a complete picture of his father, and conveys extremely heavy emotions in outstandingly few words. The talent and skill this takes is phenomenal, and Joseph makes it seem effortless. His musicality really is on full display here and when combined with some of the more technical literary devices, this collection really shines. Memory Ghost I has one of the most beautiful emotional punches, Stones has some excellent word play, that I delight in, and A Wound in Time is a great demonstration of all of Joseph's skill in one poem.He is also is a writer and presenter for the music and culture podcast "Decode" on Spotify. His most recent collection, A Blood Condition (Chatto & Windus), is shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection.

Kayo Chingonyi is joining Bloomsbury as editor to oversee the publisher's first poetry list, with its inaugural collection coming in April 2022, followed by three further titles. One of my favorite poems was about Joseph’s attendance at a Writer in Residence Conference in Washington, D.C. Music for the Dead and Resurrected, Mort's first collection to be published in the UK, grapples with the complexity of living in the shadows of imperial forces, of speaking through familial trauma with a grotesque, humorous voice, and of "seeing with more than one’s eyes". It will be released in April 2022.

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Only when I came to Goodreads to write my review did I see that this collection won the 2023 T.S. Eliot Prize on January 16, just about a week before I began reading it. I feel a bit guilty not giving it 5 stars. That’s what you get from an old fuddy duddy (old enough to say fuddy duddy) who is offended at calling free verse a sonnet. I know that’s a trend, but what’s next, 400 word haiku, villanelles of 5 lines? While annoyed, I didn’t actually drop a star for that. I’d give it 4.5 stars if that were allowed, it just didn’t speak to me as much as some other poetry I’ve read recently. Basic semiotics tell us that the written word ‘father’, the auditory sound ˈ f ɑːðə , and a photograph of the poet’s father are all symbols that denote what we might call the ‘real object’. In the case of the absent father, the poet uses the language of metonymy and in doing so Albert becomes fragmented, shrinking into symbols and gestures in the text and in the mind of the reader. Instead of saying ‘pops’ he says ‘ring’, instead of ‘dad’ he says ‘stones’, instead of ‘father’ he says nothing. Anthony reveals some of his writing process and his form of 'calypso sonnet', a politically invested line length that, he says, "enforces a melodic rhythm which reminds me of my father" and favours a decidedly Afro-Caribbean approach.