“I talk about my father’s body and the feel of his chest, and these things are personal, but they’re also universal. It is a very personal collection, but there is power in being “brutally honest”, Joseph believes. Writing the poems was a way of “pulling into place”, he says, and trying to find “the capacity to love him”, which was “a difficult process, because he was not a great father”. So he’s no longer this absent figure in my life, he’s very present in the work for me.” “But it feels like he’s in the book in a permanent way now. “It doesn’t necessarily represent him,” he adds. “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. Caribbean poets are the historians of people As well as poems, the book also contains a number of photographs of Joseph’s father. When Joseph’s father died in 2017, he began to think of writing a selection of sonnets for him, and the result – after bending the form slightly to make the poems more musical – is Sonnets for Albert. “It would be sort of like this hero figure coming back out of the desert.” He remembers his father as being “very charismatic and very funny”, someone he would always look forward to seeing. Because he wasn’t around when Joseph was a child, “he became this sort of almost mythological figure.” “My dad has always been a muse to me,” he says. But Joseph is a poet at his core, he says, and arguably it is through his poetry that he takes on his toughest subjects: in Sonnets for Albert, he reckons with the absence of his father during his youth.
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