‘Through a keen attentiveness to the complicities and possibilities of language, Heritage Aesthetics reveals how disclaiming a country might be the most honest method of loving it.’
- The Guardian
‘One of the most politically engaged poets of our time, Anaxagorou holds the busy intersectionality of history, politics and ideology in poems that remain fresh and open. On every page we feel a heartbreaking sense of fatherly tenderness with a transcultural dynamism that throws punches at our assumptions of heritage, from personhood to nationhood, from fever-dreams to the wounds of Empire, from his adopted Britain to his motherland Cyprus. Uncompromisingly inventive, Heritage Aesthetics taps into the discordant music of our time and stops us in our tracks.’
- Kit Fan
‘An education in empathy and its limitations, the liminality and porousness of nations, histories, races and memory... This is poetry bordering on pure imagination, one that makes its own conditions for living in the now.’
- Sandeep Parmar
’A playful contempt of bureaucracy’
- The Guardian
‘At once personally redemptive and historically acute [...] Anaxagorou's poems are at their most powerful when they slip into this kind of rapid rattle, the verbs fronted and the clauses lopped off their subjects. The narrative, rather than losing pace with the language, is turned, chewed, stung.’
- The Poetry Review
A manifesto for a complete, multifaceted masculinity ... makes After the Formalities essential reading for our times.
- The London Magazine
‘After the Formalities is a supreme collection. Anaxagorou’s lyrics, mapped over expansive interior and historical landscapes, feels to me as wise and weathered, and it feels to be bringing something totally new to my ear. Solid. The Self and The West catch the hardest blows, but Anaxagorou throws hands critical, bloodied, and tender all so skilfully you can’t help but come out feeling rocked too. The ghosts that haunt this collection have bless it and we are blessed for it.’
- Danez Smith
‘A burning rage with a delicate taste. After the Formalities sees a poet at the peak of his powers, playing with form and style, tone and content, while maintaining a unique voice through a characteristic mix of historical scholarship, and caustic wit.’
- Akala
‘There’s a fresh type of originality in After the Formalities; a book funded by a quiet, yet fierce knowing, that weighs its startling imagery and intuitive language with a depth of risk and vulnerability.’
- Wayne Holloway-Smith
‘Formal, experimental, dextrous, aural, democratic, radical; what Anaxagorou does in this collection breaches paraphrase. These poems work as poems should: enacting deep thought towards philosophies, and they make me hopeful.’
- Rachael Allen
Anthony Anaxagorou is a British-born Cypriot poet, fiction writer, essayist, publisher and poetry educator.
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