Anthony Joseph’s offerings for an absent father

RAY FUNK

UK-based Trinidadian Anthony Joseph’s fifth book of poetry, Sonnets for Albert, just published in the UK, is a poet’s haunting reckoning of a father who was largely absent from his son’s life. As Joseph noted to the BBC, “They’re very direct…homages to my father (and) investigations of … masculinity and fatherhood.”

But is a long time now we forgive you, Albert.

Not for what you was not, but for who you promise

to be and unfulfill. For the way your laughter

could spark up space like matchstick flame.

There are over 50 sonnets in the collection, focused on Joseph’s complex relationship with his father. It also displays numerous photographs of his father that add resonance to the tales, the hurt, the love, the memories.

These are not Shakespearean sonnets in iambic pentameter with a set rhyming scheme, but modern, free-form 14-line poems with a mesmerisingly appropriate calypso rhythm.

In a recent interview with the Amplify Project, Joseph talked about them: “The best sonnets, enable you to have a moment of contemplation and then…you move away…I was attracted to the sonnet form for that reason…

“(Some)] of them are filled with grief. Some of them are filled with humour.”

The poems present a complex vision of his father, their relationship, and the effect his absence created.

Some material in the collection deals with his father’s declining health. He was "very charismatic and very proud. And he hid his suffering. Whatever suffering that he experienced in his life, he wouldn’t speak about it.”

Focusing on his father’s life, Joseph explores his feelings, seeks to understand his father, and connect with siblings with whom he had little contact as well as his father’s death and final rites.

Fire for you, and the mothers of the church lit candles

upon your breastbone. Fire was lit, even in the hole

to purify the earth to receive you. They poured flame

from brass goblets of croton and pink ixora.

Joseph’s meditations on his father take a different turn in Memory Ghost I, which starts with a conversation with filmmaker Mariel Brown, who made a film about her father, the writer Wayne Brown's, Unfinished Sentences, and moves on to Joseph’s vision of the need to be a very different father for his own children.

that when I am gone into that gone momentum,

that my daughters

will also remember me

as fondly as the filmmaker remembers her father

and forgives him his human failings. I hope that there is time still

to shape the ghost

that must enter their memory.

There was a strong buildup for the publication of this book online. Eighteen months ago a powerful, half-hour radio show on BBC 4 was released also called Sonnets for Albert. It does focus on Joseph’s new poetry, but even more so on his conversations with other artists who had largely absent fathers, how they “interrogated their grief” and turned their complex feelings into art. It featured the great jazz singer Gregory Porter, who wrote songs about his relationship with his absent father; fellow poet Raymond Antrobus, who also wrote about his relationship with his father; and Brown
(https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000qx12).

Late last year, too, Jerwood Compton Poetry Takeover released an 80-minute video of Joseph performing a number of the poems, accompanied by Jason Yarde (saxophone, electronics) and Rod Youngs (drums). The poems come alive in this improvised setting, giving them new meaning and depth
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9W78dDzYtKQ).

For a recent BBC radio show, Front Row, Joseph performs several pieces from this collection with bass accompaniment.

Indeed, his preferred performance method is to give voice to his poetry with music. He recently recorded his entire novel The Frequency of Magic with jazz accompaniment, and is on the road regularly performing with a stellar jazz band.

This is an important collection of poetry and Joseph’s most intimate and personal to date. He taught a memoir-writing workshop for the Bocas Lit Fest during Carifesta in 2019, where he offered his students insights into transforming family memories and personal history into fine writing. No better example exists perhaps than his own latest book.

Sonnets for Albert has been shortlisted for the Forward prize in poetry in the UK.

Trinidad and Tobago bookstores like Paper Based at the Normandie should have copies of the book soon.