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

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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. 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. Chingonyi is a Geoffrey Dearmer Prize winnerand was associate poet at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in 2015. His first full-length collection, Kumukanda (Chatto), won the Dylan Thomas Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award. Hewas a Burgess Fellow at the Centre for New Writing, University of Manchester, before joining Durham University as assistant professor of creative writing. 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.

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. We hear from fellow poet Raymond Antrobus, the singer Gregory Porter and the Trinidadian film-maker Mariel Brown.

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.) 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. Did it change how you felt about your father and even about this remembered experience of childhood?

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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. One of my favorite poems was about Joseph’s attendance at a Writer in Residence Conference in Washington, D.C.