Haunting the Black Air (Bloomsbury) by Anthony Joseph moves its reader musically, with compressed and elegant density, through Trinidad in the eyes of labourers, lovers, families and upstarts. Joseph’s poetic focus is as polyphonic as it is sustained in its interest in Trinidadianness—including, notably, when that local spirit meets the incessant call of the world outside. The poet is attentive, too, to the creative legacies of other Caribbean writers, such as Kamau Brathwaite and Anthony McNeill, not so much eulogizing them as allowing their spirits to imbue the space.