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.' 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