Sonnets for Albert: Winner of the T S Eliot Prize 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. The author writes poignantly about a father, now deceased, who was never really present for him and who, in death, becomes more of a presence, demanding more of his attention, than he ever was when alive. Did it change how you felt about your father and even about this remembered experience of childhood? 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."

The poems range from the purely practical, the accepting to the regret and the longing and one does gain something of the push-me-pull-you existence of those children and young people who crave a relationship with a distant and often absent parent. We are after all, always a child until that sad time at which both our parents die and then we are forced to accept the mantle of true adulthood, often causing great reflection. One of my favorite poems was about Joseph’s attendance at a Writer in Residence Conference in Washington, D.C. Could you tell us about how Sonnets for Albert draws on your own experience and relationship with your father?The titles arebilled as representing the best of contemporary poetry "with a list that emboldens innovative, dynamic poets from across the full breadth of Anglophone poetic practice, and poetry in translation, under the editorship of one of the most exciting and celebrated poets at work today". Late in the collection in ‘Memory Ghost I’ Anthony Joseph thinks of his own daughters, and hopes that 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.

In this instalment, Fahad Al-Amoudi responds to Anthony Joseph’s latest collection, Sonnets for Albert, exploring the themes of memory, absence, and the role of the father, accompanied by an extracted poem from the collection. 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". 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. 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.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. ANTHONY: The poems are attempts to capture something of my father. My dad was a kind of mystery to me, even in the moments when we were together, when we were laughing and having fun. So I’ve tried to remember all i can and put into the book, to almost hold him in place while I negotiate his memory. Its also, at its heart, an exercise in unconditional love. A lot of readers have asked how I could write a book of sonnets about a father who was mostly absent, and really not a great father at all. But I loved my father, and found him charismatic, and this dichotomy is part of what I think gives the book its energy. 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. 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.

These poems were so easy to fold up into, they were joys to read. Anthony Joseph gives us pieces of himself, partial memories, moments in time that are always with him, gnawing at him, they probably keep him up late at night. I think all aspiring poets should read this, I think it will help them understand how to manipulate their own pain and joys floating within them. 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. 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.” I am so particular about poetry. Reading it, not writing it. I love poetry, but if it's too broad, I can't care. I write poetry to release myself from painful or beautiful moments of time, they are just for me, I know what I'm talking about, so it's okay if it's generally confusing. 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.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. 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 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.

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.” 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? 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. 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. Over the years I have realised that being a poet means that you have a particular outlook, a particular way of looking at language and seeing the world in a language-based way,” he says. “You’re trying to find a new way every time of explaining what it means to be human.”

The poet expects nothing of the absent father, so long as the absent father expects nothing of himself. This is what is known in maths as a ‘conditional equation’. The variable here is not the absent father but the poet. Joseph’s presence in the sonnets moves in several valences, like waves retreating from/climbing up the shore. By contrast, Albert finds a kind of equilibrium. Albert the chef equals Albert the taxi driver equals Albert the carpenter equals Albert the husband equals Albert the middle manager equals Albert the father. Perhaps this is the square root of elegy? ‘Each man sinks with the sum of their deeds’ (woods, ‘Epilogue’ from Rome ). The collection feels very much like a private catalogue of grief. The poems are approached with uncertainty, things are left unsaid, and the text reflects this loss in a kind of dissociation. Through anger, shame, indifference, admiration and regret, Joseph feels himself estranged from his father’s body, seemingly unable to account for the gaps between memory, vision, and the self. My father wasn’t great as a dad, but I loved him, was fascinated by him,” Joseph said in an interview with the T.S. Eliot Foundation. “At its heart the book is really about loss and love. I think love is the main theme – the capacity to love, the way we can love unconditionally where a person’s humanity, their substance, is so strong it displaces their questionable aspects.” (Video: Joseph talks about his work.)