Janine Mendes-Franco (International Voices) on Anthony Joseph, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry:
The T.S. Eliot Prize, arguably probably the most prestigious within the poetry world, honours “the very best assortment of recent verse in English first printed within the UK or the Republic of Eire.” Again in 2020, Trinidadian-British poet Roger Robinson received this prize for his poetry assortment “A Moveable Paradise.” A mere three years later, on January 16, fellow Trinidadian Anthony Joseph has adopted in his footsteps with “Sonnets for Albert,” which the judges referred to as “a luminous assortment which celebrates humanity in all its contradictions and breathes new life into this enduring type.”
Joseph himself has mentioned the ebook is “about loss and love.” Admitting his personal father “wasn’t nice as a dad,” Joseph defined that the gathering helped him “make sense” of his father “and the impression of his absences.”
[. . .] Writing about his win for the Trinidad and Tobago Newsday newspaper, good friend and fellow Trinidadian-British author Monique Roffey, who in 2021 received the Costa ebook of the yr for her “totally unique” Mermaid of Black Conch, famous that “Sonnets for Albert is Joseph’s masterwork and a significant contribution to the up to date Caribbean cannon”:
The poems, a group of sonnets written in Trinidadian dialect, are each an examination of Caribbean masculinity and a composite portrait of a largely absent father; they’re a physique of labor which each holds his topic to account and in addition, stoically, understands.
When coping with such an emotional topic, it’s simple for the work to lose itself and turn out to be trite or maudlin, however Roffey lauded the gathering for not “slid[ing] into sentimentality.”
Apparently, Joseph shares a love of music with 2019’s winner. Robinson, whom the UK Guardian described as a “dub poet,” made a couple of albums together with his band, King Midas Sound; Joseph, too, has a band. Noting that “Joseph was largely self-taught as a poet,” Roffey mentioned that “from the get go, [he] recognized with language, with creole dialect, and with literature in all its types”:
He’s a phrase man and a person who knew who his gods and goddesses have been, early on, (Walcott, Brathwaite, Carter and Audre Lorde) and he knew the place dwelling was, too, Trinidad.
By the way, Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott was awarded the T.S. Eliot prize in 2011 for White Egrets. [. . .]
For full article, see https://globalvoices.org/2023/01/21/anthony-joseph-is-the-second-trinidadian-in-three-years-to-win-the-t-s-eliot-prize-for-poetry