Christopher J. Griffin

The focus of this commentary is on the first poem of Anthony Joseph’s third poetry collection, Bird Head Son (2009). Narrated anti-chronologically, Bird Head Son comprises a series of autobiographical poems that depict the first twenty-three years of Joseph’s life in Trinidad, where he was born. Throughout the collection, Joseph is concerned with the natural world, religion, carnival, and loneliness. These themes are engaged through a mythic, dream-scape conception of the Caribbean.

The first poem, ‘Bosch’s Vision’, begins on the day of Joseph’s departure from Trinidad to England in 1989. It narrates an apocalyptic vision of the continent that awaits him on the other side of the Atlantic.

Whilst there are at least five stanzas in the poem, it is unclear how many there are in total. This is due to the poem’s chaotic typography, that is, the layout of the text across the page. The poem is written in free-verse and so lacks a consistent metre, accentuating the sense of chaos. This is further compounded by the poem’s use of enjambment and how these lines are also indented to differing extents, further adding to the impression of an unpredictable vision unfolding through the poem:

                  with a dim groan in the afternoon.
         I saw my grandmother
                  embrace me
                           in her hand stitched dress
                  and wrench my soulcage open. (3)

Subsequently, the speaker experiences prophetic ‘vistas of an apocalyptic Europe’, where they hear ‘obscure tongues’, witness ‘the sky become peppered with woe’, and see a land in which ‘[t]he sun long gone and weeping’. This prophetic quality, both in style and content, reflects the title of the poem, ‘Bosch’s Vision’, a reference to the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch (c.1450–1516). Bosch is renowned for his often nightmarish and apocalyptic paintings which engage with religious concepts and narratives, as most famously seen in his The Garden of Earthly Delights. In choosing a European artist as the inspiration and title for the poem, Joseph appropriates Bosch’s visions of a biblical Hell and inserts, in its place, a European one, whose maritime climate and various, unknown languages are grave threats.

The poem’s emphatically Caribbean perspective is intensified by the speaker’s vision of the military in Europe: ‘[s]lack eyed soldiers were howling / in the wind’. This echoes the language of one of Joseph’s major influences, Kamau Brathwaite, who described how the poetry of the Caribbean falls outside of European senses of rhythm and metre with reference to hurricanes:

The hurricane that came through into the Caribbean every year began to howl in my ears and as I listened to that sound of another death I knew however that it wasn’t howling in pentameters… That is not pentameter. (Brathwaite 1992: 5)

Whilst Caribbean hurricanes do not howl in pentameter, the soldiers in the winds of Europe do. If not for the syntactic break in ‘[s]lack eyed soldiers were howling / in the wind’, the line would be in iambic pentameter. At the level of metre, therefore, Joseph evokes a conflict between European and Caribbean perspectives. Relatedly, in other works, Joseph has directly connected his need to write experimentally with a desire to avoid being ‘re-colonized’ by Britain (Joseph 1997: 18).

Rapidly, the poem moves into a more biblical but no less personal image: pairing the extraction of ‘oil’ in Trinidad with ‘The Devil’, ‘who chased the colour from the earth. / Who left sulphur where he spoke / like a jitney carburettor’. In Trinidad and Tobago, a jitney is ‘a small pickup truck with an enclosed cab’ (Winer 2009: 469). This mention of a vehicle marks an anxiety that is expressed with greater clarity later, when the speaker travels ‘to the airport’ to leave Trinidad. Indeed, immediately after the parallel is drawn between oil and the Devil, the speaker expresses ‘No doubt’ that it was the devil ‘Who crakt / the sky glass lid’ – that is, who first exposed the sky as limitless and made lands abroad accessible.

The following stanza highlights one of Joseph’s recurrent interests: the equivocal nature of language. The speaker implores: ‘Maman / Tell me again why I should leave this island / Tell me again that those cities exist’. ‘Maman’, in French, means ‘mother’ (Winer 2009: 561). France frequently occupied the colony of Trinidad and Tobago between 1666 and 1803 and greatly influenced the nation language spoken there. The speaker, then, is expressing a searching vulnerability, turning to their mother to confirm that England is a land of promise. Similarly, however, in line with the biblical undercurrent of the poem, ‘Maman’ can be aurally interpreted as ‘Mammon’ – one of the seven princes of Hell. Mammon represents promises of wealth and material gain, and Joseph has spoken about how writers in the Caribbean are compelled to leave in order to have a career as a writer. More than anything else, England represented access to books and educational opportunities. Here, Mammon is implored to hear the speaker’s anxious pleas and confirm that the European hell their soul has witnessed will bear these opportunities.

This sense of fearful apprehension intensifies near the end of ‘Bosch’s Vision’, at the level of form, as the speaker approaches the airport. The speaker’s relative comfort in Trinidad is implied through the equally indented and self-contained lines:

          Woodslaves ran and woodslaves waited.
          Lovers lay against the Samaan trees.
          Cattle grazed and bachacs burned
                     in matchbox discoteques. (4)

But the vision begins to trail off and the lines become shorter, before being broken by a new stanza:

                  But we were going to the airport
         and my brother in the backseat
                                             is him I ask: is me
                                             this happening to? (4)

The typography embodies the speaker’s voice: diminutive, askance, and crushed into the corner, expressive of anxiety.

Overall, ‘Bosch’s Vision’ expresses great fear and doubt about the possibilities that the European continent represents, specifically in relation to the climate, the language, and, implicitly, on how England may affect one’s roots in the Caribbean home and one’s ability to write in a manner true to that. All of this is conveyed through a fantastical blend of biblical imagery, multiple languages, and allusions to the impact of Empire on Trinidad and Tobago. 

Bibliography

Brathwaite, Kamau, ‘Caliban’s Guarden’, Wasafari 8:16, (1992), 2-6.

Joseph, Anthony, Teragaton (London: poisonenginepress, 1997).

—, Bird Head Son (London: Salt, 2009).

Winer, Lise, Dictionary of the English/Creole of Trinidad & Tobago (Montreal: McGill & Queens University Press, 2009).

Cite this: Griffin, Christopher J. “A close-reading of Anthony Joseph’s ‘Bosch’s Vision’ from Bird Head Son (2009).” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2020, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 8 February 2026.

The post A close-reading of Anthony Joseph’s ‘Bosch’s Vision’ from <em>Bird Head Son (2009)</em> appeared first on writers make worlds.

Biography

Writing

Anthony Joseph, 2016 (Photo: Bonuggy CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

As Anthony Joseph stated in a recent lecture: ‘I’m not British. I’m not English… I didn’t grow up here’. In both their experimental form and content, Joseph’s poetry, novels, and music seek to reflect the experience of the Caribbean, especially life and culture in Trinidad. However, rather than adhering to a single national or cultural identity, Joseph consciously situates himself and his work within a global literary lineage.

His poetry expresses this in multiple ways. He writes in several different languages, such as Haitian creole, Trinidad and Tobago nation language, Yoruba, Jamaican patois, French, and English. These are combined with an avant-garde, surrealist sensibility, that uses broken syntax, neologisms, non-linear narrative, and innovative punctuation and capitalization. The impact of the French Oulipo movement on his work is clear, but so is that of Caribbean writers such as Wilson Harris, Kamau Brathwaite and Aimé Césaire. Joseph has said that it is these ‘like-minded black experimentalists’ that he turned to when he could find none in the United Kingdom (Joseph 2009: 155).

The polyvocality and formal innovation of Joseph’s work constitutes a challenge to what he calls ‘conceptual colonialism’: that is, the predominance of a certain type of black British writing, which is ‘performative’ with a ‘linear narrative’ that calls ‘for class- and race-based social interventions… [alongside] directly discussing dual identities and cultural tensions’ (Ramey 2009: 88).

This activist-style of writing, in Joseph’s view, was once radical. However, today, it is the norm and there is a limit to the kinds of questions it allows one to ask and the answers that are possible therein. As Joseph says during the final, eponymous track of his latest album, People of the Sun (2018): ‘the surface of a thing will never give up its secrets if all you do is ask’.

This commitment to going beyond surface-level engagements translates into the mythic, dream-like quality of Joseph’s work, a style that attempts to capture experiences of alienation, exile, music, landscape, and the legacy of slavery. His earliest poetry collections, Desafinado (1994) and Teragaton (1997), experiment with this in mind, with the latter inviting ‘participants’, rather than an audience, to create the text through their interaction with it. Bird Head Son (2009) begins from the day Joseph migrated to London and works anti-chronologically through his life, focusing on landscape in a similar vein to Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea: beautiful, unpredictable, and often biblical.

The significance of non-linear narration is most acutely felt in Joseph’s novels. The Frequency of Magic (2019) depicts Trinidad through one-hundred chapters, each exactly one thousand words long. Rather than a single protagonist, the novel features dozens of recurrent narrators, often retelling images from previous chapters in new contexts, which create momentary footholds for the reader navigating their way through the complex and fragmented narrative.

Bird in Hand, Ellen Gallagher, 2006, Photo: © Tate, London 2020. 
Joseph’s The African Origins of UFOs, like Ellen Gallagher’s Bird in Hand, is an Afrofuturist engagement with the black diaspora: surreal, otherworldly, and fractured across time.

This style is most evident in Joseph’s Afrofuturist debut novel, The African Origins of UFOs (2006). Praised by Kamau Brathwaite and Linton Kwesi Johnson, Origins is a narrative of twenty-four chapters divided across three intersecting sections. The first is set in Kunu Supia, a space colony of the Caribbean diaspora in the year 3053; the second takes place in present-day Trinidad; and the third offers a Caribbean creation myth of Trinidad set in a folkloric past. The overall narrative mimics the image of the Sankofa – the melding of past, present, and future into one shared form. In this way it explores the alienation and tensions within a diaspora ‘lost in space, drifting from place to place, still trying to find where they come from’ (137).

In a British cultural context in which nostalgia thrives, Anthony Joseph’s poetry and prose are sources of constant formal innovation that resists the mainstream while also engrossing readers through its otherness.

—Christopher J. Griffin, 2020

Cite this: Griffin, Christopher J. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2020, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 8 February 2026.

The post Anthony Joseph appeared first on writers make worlds.