We Alive, Beloved: Poems 
Frederick Joseph, Row House, £13.06

IT’S a tough nut to crack: ever-escalating violence: war; assassination attempts; BLM protests met with batons and the same old racism; annihilations, terrorism; the US with more guns than people. 

When leadership and the vigour of new ideas are needed folks are treated with the same tired bromides that didn’t work to begin with.

The UN, which was meant to be a beacon away from the darkness of interstate conflict and a reminder to co-operate in improving the commonweal of humankind, is a dud outfit. 

We learn that there are billions of potential Earths in our galaxy alone, and that there are billions of galaxies in the universe and that ours is just one of many in a multiverse. We have never seemed so diminished. 

Back in 1945, just before the bomb drop on Hiroshima changed everything, HG Wells put out his last book with a title that seemed to sum up the human condition: Mind at the End of Its Tether. It’s easy to feel alone and overwhelmed with a metaphysics that eludes clear meaning.

But Frederick Joseph’s poetry does what the best stuff does: it acknowledges the universal pain, it lifts, and challenges the reader to respond to such a world — first by surviving its terrors and pressures.

The most rewarding return from reading Joseph’s new volume of poems, We Alive, Beloved, is the music kicking around in his heart and its invitation to join in the rhythm and dance the blues away. 

His poem We Dance, Because We Alive invites the observer from the audience, the reader, to come up on the stage and do just that — dance with the dancer, engage rather than merely consume.

He writes: “The synergy between the dancer/ and the once-passive observer is electric. Emboldened, the dancer reaches out again,/ inviting another from the audience. And then another — until the stage fills,/ a rainbow of individuals.”

It works as a great enactment of reader-response theory — and as dance.

Though the word “resilience” has become a buzzword in our times, and Joseph reanimates it with fresh, clever and often brilliant lyricism. I was sometimes struck with a kind of awe and jealousy of his facility with language. 

In My Father’s Void he imagines the black hole opened up by his father’s death, but surprises the reader with an unanticipated perspectival shift: “On the other side is me./ Pulling in fragments of cosmos,/ From every soul who leans in close,/ pouring into me parts of themselves/ as hugs. Kisses. Laughter. Shoulders to cry on.” 

The very gravity of grief.

Joseph’s themes are deeply personal and familial, concrete but also abstract, and always precisely cadenced and breathing with lyricism. He writes of being a father, a husband, a friend, a child and a philosopher. 

Being Black is a heavy motif in Joseph’s poetry. He can approach the subject with circumspection, or with righteous disappointment at the ignorance and herd mentality that fuels racism.

In Black Threat he writes: “A society, steeped like bitter tea in fear,/ bathes in the falsehood of Black as synonymous with wrong./ In their minds, melanin is a marker of menace,/ a twisted signal fire of a threat existing only in perception.” 

Skin-deep othering. Still alive — and kicking with jackboots.

When his wife loses a child in birthing, he struggles for words: “There is nothing to say, when spun into a vortex of unspeakable loss… And I wondered, how are we going to survive this,/ And in time, my question was answered: Together.” 

Joseph is, to modify another current buzzword, the poet as Lived Experience Expert, the one who brings the magical, seeing, healing language of resilience.

He writes in Notes from Therapy, which he has been in and out of for years: “This world bruises us into retreat.” The poet pushes “becoming,” “transformation,” “possibility.”  Keep on keeping on, as Dylan says, with Joseph adding: “Write, rewrite, until the ink runs dry.” 

Frederick Joseph can be followed at frederickjoseph.substack.com.