Review of 'Bird Head Son' by CRB

Anthony Joseph’s opening poem is titled “Bosch’s Vision”, and begins:

It started as I was leaving
…..with a dim groan in the afternoon.

What started? Where are we? The title, combined with these opening two lines, is unsettling. His is a wider canvas than Robinson’s, used to explore the personal and the universal. Like Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings, Joseph offers terrifying images of suffering and Hell, which he transposes to modern Europe and Trinidad. The phrase “a dim groan” gestures to later themes of a painful upbringing, the lamentation for a distant father, and his mother’s death, to which the section “The Tropic of Cancer” is devoted. His uncluttered opening sentence calls to mind Derek Walcott’s search for the line of poetry as a clear and most natural statement. There are other instances, as in “Conductors of his Mystery”, which ends: “He came back smelling of the sea.” On the other hand, the breath space in the second line of his opening poem offers the merest hint of Kamau Brathwaite’s Sycorax style. These elements suggest that Joseph has kept a close ear on contemporary Caribbean writing, and we should not be surprised to find echoes of other Caribbean poets throughout the collection. So, for example, in this poem he recalls Paul Keens-Douglas’s refrain “Tell me again” from his poem of the same title, which invokes, among other things, the mixed blessing of Trinidad’s oil.

Here's a new review of my recent 'Bird Head Son' collection by the Caribbean Review of Books, reviewed alongside my friend Roger Robinson's 'Suckle'.

Read the whole review here :

http://caribbeanreviewofbooks.com/crb-archive/23-september-2010/homestyle/