After the Formalities E-Book

Anthony Anaxagorou

• Herausgeber: Penned in the Margins
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 57

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

- 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.'

Leseprobe

AFTERTHEFORMALITIES

Anthony Anaxagorou is a British-born Cypriot poet, fiction writer, essayist, publisher and poetry educator. His poetry and fiction have appeared on BBC Newsnight, BBC Radio 4, ITV, Vice UK, Channel 4 and Sky Arts, and have been published in POETRY, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, Granta, The Rialto, Oxford Poetry, Wildness and The Feminist Review. In 2015 he won the Groucho Maverick Award and was shortlisted for the Hospital Club’s H-100 Award for most influential people in writing and publishing. In 2019 he was made an honorary fellow of the University of Roehampton. He has toured extensively in Europe and Australia. Anthony is artistic director of Out-Spoken, a poetry and live music night in London, and publisher of Out-Spoken Press.

PUBLISHEDBYPENNEDINTHEMARGINS

Toynbee Studios, 28 Commercial Street, London E1 6AB

www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk

All rights reserved

© Anthony Anaxagorou 2019

The right of Anthony Anaxagorou to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Penned in the Margins.

First published 2019

ISBN

978-1-908058-65-2

ePub ISBN

978-1-908058-73-7

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

CONTENTS

Lockstep

Cause

Departure Lounge Twenty Seventeen

Four Small Indiscretions

Uber

A Line of Simple Inquiry

Things Already Lost

After the Formalities

How Men Will Remember Their Fathers

Once I Had an Acceptance Speech

Oiling Brakes

Cocaine God

Testimony as Omission

There Are No Ends, Only Intervals

Connatural

Saying

Sublimation

Sympathy for Rain

Life Insurance

A Boy Stood Still

Patricide

Nautical Almanac

Talking to Myself in Halves

Meeting the End of the World as Yourself

What the Lesser Water Boatman Had to Say

Jeremy Corbyn at the Doctor’s Surgery

Separation Has Its Own Economy

Ecumene

Following on from Kant

Biographer

Unpronounceable Circle

I Kissed a Dead Man’s Mouth in May

Two Daughters. Their Mother.

A Discursive Meditation on the Photograph

From Here the Camera Crew

Inheritance

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS/NOTES

THANKS

To Sabrina Mahfouz, Joelle Taylor, Jack Underwood, Wayne Holloway-Smith and Chimene Suleyman: thank you for trusting these poems and for your generous instruction. Thank you to Arts Council England. To Tom MacAndrew and Sarah Sanders.

To my agent Claudia Young at Greene & Heaton and to Tom Chivers at Penned in the Margins. Thank you for believing in the work. To my family. To my friends. To the wonderful poets of today who continue to make extraordinary and vital work during these fractious times.

To my beloved grandmother who passed away during the writing of this book. I miss you very much. And to my son, Tabari: I hope when I’m old you’ll read these poems with the same fondness I discovered when writing them.

In memory of Stella Stylianou

January 1922 – January 2018

After theFormalities

The voice is a second face

GÉRARDBAUËR

Lockstep

to those

fathers

their boys

the way it has to happen

Cause

& to the burning I say

    my worry is a whole country.

I’ve been myself longer

than my undoing —

            heavy trunk of silverware

museum glass polish

            portraiture

of bent flags.

I’m here as my grandparents were

            only with a moving mouth.

        During empire

my people were subjects first

citizens later    once the vigilantes

managed to zip up their coats

flames lambent

my grandmother died with umbrellas

outstretched in her gut my grandmother

            died

              to be British

   is to be everywhere.

                        Some roots

have been in the earth

        for so long

they know only to call themselves     earth.

A worm’s pink nipple bleeds into snow.

      My birth

my mother’s brown skin     I’d already

filled half myself     with Britannia’s

air     it took them a month to find my name.

Departure Lounge Twenty Seventeen

Before Trump marshalled January

to do winter’s work to breach fruit

        children peppered oceans

        like ends of warm bread

before Harvey Weinstein Tarana Burke

spoke smoke into a litany of nuns

        before functionaries filled death ledgers

        with names they mispronounced

before Theresa May triggered Article 50

crouched on a wet rooftop in Lisbon

        the departure lounge was heavy

        with pilots who no longer trusted the sky

& my grandmother is making her way

into a forest barefoot

before floral tributes crown

a Mancunian grief

        before Celotex expressed sympathies

        for the seventy-two it turned into moons

& my grandmother is making her way

into a forest barefoot

        before oceans reversed slowly into cages

        like blue meat in a slaughterhouse

before the Pope prayed in apology

for the drift of the refugee crunching roaches

        underfoot before Darren Osborne sat in a room

        full of his mood watching Three Girls too loud

I wished to god

I could keep my wishing for my son

        but before I turn I need to leave

        the rubbish where it can be seen:

a mountain has abandoned snow

freezing hands to warn my heart

        & no matter how many times I try forgetting

        I still hear

my grandmother’s name yelled into a forest

its bodies taking on water

        chainsaws stressing honey at the root

        I’m calling

but January keeps my voice for itself

dumping it where only wilderness breeds

        lifting memory    spilling into cloud

before washing her feet     before clipping her nails

      before watching her turn to face the gone

Four Small Indiscretions

We came from the south, spun from forty sperm

blaming the Achaeans or the scimitar

my grandmother’s suitcase was three-part crucifix

      one-part donkey dung

it’s worth noting

beyond Socratic thought, Mount Elbrus,

the Knights Hospitaller and their

arquebuses

how throughout school I believed the British proof

stored in my vault, coral fructifying

manacles

spent my strangest coins on their thickest books

only to keep finding myself a murmur

it’s also worth noting the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee, Cyprus

and my father’s reluctance to confess

at the age of three teachers branded me a mute

words were just odd signs with tiny legs.

This week I’ve had eight rejections

leaving me feeling like a breatharian

stepping out a Bronze Age bath,

Cleitus watching Alexander pour his last,

the sun setting, Europa feeding Zeus a sick

fowl.

Like most Westerners when I find myself lost

I venture Eastwards with nothing

but a gaze and an idea

I never make it past airport security

who question where I’m headed and why;

each night my son sketches my face

with his strongest lines and the last of his reds,