After the Formalities
After the Formalities by Anthony Anaxagorou, published by Penned in the Margins in 2019, is a poetry collection that delves into complex themes surrounding race, identity, and familial relationships. This edition comprises 108 pages and is presented in English. The collection features a range of poems that explore the intersection of personal and global histories, reflecting on the impact of political and social forces on individual lives.
Readers will find that Anaxagorou’s work is technically accomplished and emotionally resonant, as it addresses the pressures faced by the male body in contemporary society. The poems confront issues of racism and race science, drawing from the poet’s Cypriot heritage, while also celebrating the joys and challenges of parenthood. Through vivid imagery and a blend of scholarly and streetwise perspectives, the collection offers a nuanced examination of identity and resilience in the face of adversity.
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- 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.’
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