- Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize
- A Poetry Society Recommendation
- A Guardian Poetry Book of the Year
- One of The Telegraph's Best Poetry Books of 2019
A knife is pulled. An Uber driver is racially abused on the day of the
Brexit referendum. A father bathes his son in ice water. A schoolboy
drives a drawing pin into a map of the world. The threat of violence is
never far away in Anthony Anaxagorou's breakthrough collection After
the Formalities. Technically achieved, emotionally transformative and
razor-sharp, these are poems that confront and contradict; poems in
which the scholarly synthesises with the streetwise, and global
histories are told through the lens of one family.
Anaxagorou 'speaks against the darkness', tracking the male body under
pressure from political and historical forces, and celebrates the
precarious joy of parenthood. The title poem is a meditation on racism
and race science that draws on the poet's Cypriot heritage and is as
uncomfortable as it is virtuosic. Elsewhere, in a sequence of prose
poems that shimmer with lyric grace, he writes, 'I'm your father & the
only person keeping you alive.'
