The gone momentum: Anthony Joseph on ‘Sonnets for Albert’

Absent fathers, childhood solitude, silence and the production of poetry

In April 2006, I delivered a paper at the first Black British Aesthetics conference at Howard University, Washington. Later, after twelve hours of ten-dollar words, a few of us – young black scholars, poets and academics – gathered in the apartment of the British writer in residence. We drank tea and wine and listened to neo-soul into dawn, then ventured out for breakfast in two cars, through the leaning streets and among the looming white monuments of the Capitol. We ate pancakes, heavy-headed with discourse and restless sleeplessness. The talk swung to family, to fathers in particular, and around the table, one by one, we discovered that each of our fathers was absent in our childhoods. This was pivotal. I wondered if there was some correlation between absentee fathers and the poets their children became. Ask your poet friends.

My own father had been an intermittent presence in my childhood. He and my mother married when she was 18 and he just 23. Their relationship fell apart soon after I was born. Somehow they managed to have a second child a year later, my brother Dennis, but by then my father was well into that ‘gone momentum’; always a departure, then the anticipation of each arrival. 

I was sent to live with my grandmother, and I grew to know and love my father even in his absence and in the small glimpses on those soulful days when he would unexpectedly appear, grinning in the sun. When he would bend, barebacked in the garden, to help his mother weed around her anthuriums, to drive hard along the avenue in his grass-green 

Hillman Hunter. 

He lived and worked in Tobago and had started a new family there. We sang for him over oceans. But it wasn’t until the early eighties that he returned to Trinidad permanently. And I got to know my father a bit better, but still only in fragments. Sonnets for Albert is, in many ways, simply a place to hold him still. But it is also an attempt to understand how a relationship characterised by absence and partial presences could lead to poems that celebrate and memorialise him. In the meantime, I know this: that his laughter could irrigate the land, that the knock of his cigarette hilt to the pack was magic. A spiritualist, he had been to the bottom of the sea and had stood on the Guinea coast to be given sacred words and secret colours. The muse, the cocksman, the rake, conductor of mystery, a man who wore silver rings and suede boots, beige and gabardine bell-bottoms.

I am not sure if there is a relation between absent fathers and the production of poetry. But I can say that as a young child living with my grandparents, there was a turning-in, an introversion in which the world was reduced to language. Trapped in my silence and solitude, I roamed the wild bush alone, composing verse while hunting hairy snakes and strange fruit. 

I was not able to articulate it then, since I was a fish and the world was water, but my introversion was a way of coping, of knowing that my family was broken, that for many years my mother was not allowed in the house to visit me, and that my father, my grandmother’s sugar-dumpling, lived the saga-boy life a boat ride away in Tobago, yet remained so far away, distant even in his returning, hard to hold, harder to be held.

What is it about fathers? In poems, they are often harbingers of death, meditations on our own mortality. I am thinking here of Walt Whitman’s ‘On the Beach at Night’, Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Father Death Blues’, Sharon Olds’ ‘His Stillness’, Linton Kwesi Johnson’s ‘Reggae Fi Dada’, Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’, of Cornelius Eady’s collection You Don’t Miss Your Water, Raymond Antrobus’s To Sweeten Bitter. In each, loss, the unresolved and, ultimately, death, are at the centre. 

Often, there is acceptance – the poem or collection serving to memorialise – but at other times, as in Eady and Antrobus, the poem is a combative space where the poet wrestles with bitterness and love in search of closure and understanding. The poems I’ve written about my father do both. While some remember him with fondness, and try to transpose his spirit, others negotiate a space for disappointment, while trying to clutch his outer garments.

I never lived with my father, never called him ‘Dad’. The closest I got to him was early one Saturday morning when we had driven to Maracas Beach on Trinidad’s north coast. It was Ash Wednesday, and I was leaving Trinidad later that day. We swam out among the waves and were bobbing and gossiping in the water. Suddenly we realised that we had drifted further, and that each wave was pulling us deeper out to sea. I pulled against the current to the shore, but my father panicked. I looked back from my own escape, to see his eyes blaze open with urgency. He flung his arms in wide gasps and his hand found mine. I pulled him out of the terror, and he lived, and in that moment of grip and danger, I knew him, finally. But in a year, he would die, gasping for air.

Anthony Joseph is an award-winning Trinidad-born poet, novelist, academic and musician. He is the author of four poetry collections and three novels. In 2019, he was awarded a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. His new collection Sonnets for Albert (Bloomsbury) won the 2022 T. S. Eliot Prize. He holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at De Montfort University, Leicester.