Firstly, HUGE congratulations on winning the T.S. Eliot prize for Sonnets for Albert. What does this win and recognition for the collection mean for you? Wasafiri’s ‘Meditations’ is a new series that features creative and personal responses to new literature, asking writers to seek connections with themselves, their own work, and the text they’re reading. Lying between criticism and life writing, each ‘Meditation’ offers a unique angle to view the writer and the reader, and the world around them. His work also confirms how time, age, human experience, pain, the ups and downs are materials in the creation of beautiful art. 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? 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

I tried to make sense of his absence by putting all the memories I have of him, as much as I could remember, as much as I could express, into a single collection,” Joseph says. Two adults in the home, but only one parent”- Singing Sandra: Caribbean Man. You will appreciate why I had to quote this if you read Sonnets for Albert. I also think that in a wider sense Caribbean life is at the centre of what it means to be human,” he says. “If anyone wants to learn about what it means to be a postmodern or postcolonial human being, look at the Caribbean. The Caribbean is a microcosm. Everything that you can see in the world – immigration, migration, climate change, issues around gender – you find it all compressed in the Caribbean.” Joseph closes his collection using imagery that compares trees planted above bones as “ladders for spirits to cross into heaven”. This ethereal piece of imagery then leads to the final sentence that “we shall all be rooted in this well of hours, eventually”. The only guarantee in life is death. The simplicity in knowing that is perhaps what leads Joseph to make peace with his father, and the creation of art is what guides him along that journey. Sonnets for Albert will now help others come to terms with their grief and loss, helping not only Joseph but the reader as well which ultimately is what art should become, a helping hand. when he dies, his book an attempt to form an understandable shape out of the ghost in his own memory.

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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. 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: This little book of poems had been left on the bookshelf in the guest room of where we are currently staying and kept me engaged for a few evenings before switching off the light.

In Sonnets for Albert , the poet is trying to find his largely absent father. ‘Tall jungle’; ‘appeared through curtains’; the brim of a sailor’s cap covering one eye; fingering through his jewellery. Everything about the poet’s father is veiled, or encrypted in performance. The absent father leaves clues. The wind doesn’t blow for months. The Hathaway record skips. The myth of him grows , and the rhythms of absence become familiar. The sonnet becomes the poet’s key to seeing. 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.

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Joseph is also an academic, lecturing in creative writing at King’s College London. Teaching means he has to keep reading contemporary work, he says, and recent favourites include Warsan Shire’s Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head and Fred D’Aguiar’s memoir Year of Plagues. Text is a social space, where everyone you have ever read is watching over your shoulder. Or, in the words of billy woods, ‘the gang’s all here.’ Something that writers are often taught to do early in their career is to create a ‘tree’ of their inspirations. Part of this exercise is to do with the process of voice but it also helps to understand that all writing is reading, and all reading is re-reading, re-configuring, rendering again. Just as you have blood, you have a literary inheritance, and inheritance is itself a kind of form. How to be a father. How to be a son. In Seamus Heaney’s ‘Digging’, the poet’s father digs his own grave searching for his father, who is also digging his own grave. In writing this discovery, Heaney grapples with a rejection of tradition, and the language of inheritance is re-calibrated from the ‘spade’ to the ‘pen’. Heaney, as Joseph’s aunt might say, is doing ‘ the work of generations’. One of my favorite poems was about Joseph’s attendance at a Writer in Residence Conference in Washington, D.C. He is currently working on a collection of essays, as well as a book of selected poems, and is due to record another album this year. Poetry, though, informs it all.

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. 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. Chingonyi said of the new list: "There are as many types of poetry as there are types of reader and this list is in service of that idea –that poetry is an expansive and capacious art form. As an editor I work in service of each poem, each group of poems, and I’m honoured to be helping bring these poems, bold, expansive, and beautiful as they are, to readers. Late in the collection in ‘Memory Ghost I’ Anthony Joseph thinks of his own daughters, and hopes that 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."As well as this universality, Joseph believes that Caribbean poets are “the historians and the biographers of people” from the area, because “so much of our history is lost and [has] been taken away from us”. Could you tell us about how Sonnets for Albert draws on your own experience and relationship with your father?

The first two lines of the first poem in Anthony Joseph’s collection Sonnets for Albert (which won the 2022 T.S.Eliot Prize for poetry) tell us the direction this book will be heading: straight into the heat of emotion, straight into what being a ‘son’ means. Like Hamlet, who is ‘too much ‘i th’ sun’, the poet tries to make sense of a troubled paternal heritage. His late father was to a great extent a mystery, a man who abandoned children (he left Trinidad at one point for another family in Tobago), and these poems are attempts to (re)create him, to make sense of what his son now feels about him. 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. Joseph was announced as the winner at a ceremony at the Wallace Collection in London on 16th January. He said he was "speechless" to have received the award, joking "I’ve been in this for a long time, you can see the grey beard". I admired Joseph’s choices of what to say and what to leave out. He kept it real. This book is his attempt to understand the father he barely knew. You feel the deep emotion that avoids leaning into the maudlin. Beautiful balance.It doesn’t necessarily represent him,” he adds. “But it feels like he’s in the book in a permanent way now. So he’s no longer this absent figure in my life, he’s very present in the work for me.” My dad has always been a muse to me,” he says. Because he wasn’t around when Joseph was a child, “he became this sort of almost mythological figure.” The second publication, Joseph's Sonnets For Albert, explores the impact of being the son of an absent, or mostly absent, fatherin poems that, "though they threaten to break under the weight of their emotions, are always masterfully poised as the charismatic man they depict". The work, out in June 2022, is the poet's first collection since 2013. I am really unfamiliar with reading poetry. It is something I aimed to explore this year and seeing as it is September, that is going really well. Anthony Joseph's Sonnets for Albert won the TS Elliot Prize at the start of this year, so I thought it would be a good place to start. It has a lot to recommend itself, though I'm not sure if it is a good base for further exploration of the art.