Haunting the Black Air
From the Winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2022
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Haunting the Black Air
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Anthony Joseph
'A kaleidoscope of image and word-power . . . A vital addition to the canon' MAGGIE HARRIS
'A work of rare formal daring and spiritual depth' PETER GIZZI
From the T. S. Eliot Prize-winning author of Sonnets for Albert comes a dextrous and versatile new collection spanning the emotional spectrum of unabashed joy and crippling grief
With musicality and verve, beloved poet and musician Anthony Joseph undertakes a bold new work, excavating the complex nature of feeling. Across London, New York, Trinidad and beyond, whether a funeral in New Cross or a house party in Mount Lambert, Joseph brings heart, soul and verbal ingenuity to the act of unifying life's beautiful fragments.
'Joseph is both a faithful heir and an agnostic rebel' ALI ALIZADEH
'An exceptional talent' BLAKE MORRISON©2026 Anthony Joseph (P)2026 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
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Critic reviews
Anthony Joseph’s Haunting the Black Air is a polyphonic exploration of memory, diaspora and sound. Blending poetry, history and Caribbean cosmology, the collection moves with the rhythms of jazz, weaving personal narrative with shifting language. This work is attentive to breath, silence, resonance – and listens as much as it speaks (ROMALYN ANTE, author of Antiemetic for Homesickness)
Anthony Joseph writes as if language itself were a drumhead stretched tight across history, each line struck with precision, improvisation and risk. The gorgeous poems in Haunting the Black Air bend and fracture, accumulate and release, carrying grief, beauty, violence and love in the same breath where intellect and instinct dissolve into rhythm, and rhythm, in turn, becomes a form of knowledge. The result is a poetics that is as rigorous as it is sensuous, as grounded in lived experience as it is open to the surreal and the visionary. This is a work of rare formal daring and spiritual depth – a book of friendship that enlarges what poetry can do, how it can sound and how it can carry the weight of the world while still singing (PETER GIZZI, author of Fierce Elegy)
Haunting the Black Air is a captivating and expansive work. Its landscape and people are rendered so vividly, so imaginatively and so compassionately. Here, conversations reach back and forth in time, and in tribute to writers, musicians, the shopkeeper, even. It is full of music, in the revelry of sound and in echoes (‘a poem is a list of echoes’). Here, ‘myth fulfils the interstice between memory and loss’ (A List of Echoes), because this is a work rooted in tradition and in legacy, that invites careful reading and re-reading. Anthony moves us through elegy, history, through the virtuosity of a jazz riff, the Afrofuturist lens. He writes with an accomplished precision that is generous to the reader, never losing us in all of its experimentation in form, syntax, words, and even letters within the words. This is a powerful, surprising, wonderful book (KEITH JARRETT)
It’s a commonplace to say that poetry is connected to music, but Anthony Joseph’s poetry lives in a miraculous space where we’re never quite sure if language or sound predominate . . . In a major leap forward, Joseph continues to astonish with his unique and essential virtuosity in a book that compels rereading and savouring for anyone who wants to know where we’re going next (LAURI SCHEYER, author of A History of African American Poetry)
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