Anthony Wilson’s poems explore the borderline territory between grief and laughter, memory and forgetting, illness and health. His central subject is the way we live within family and community, questioning the roles we construct, both alone and with others. The Afterlife continues to pursue themes developed in his last collection with Worple, Riddance: mortality, mental health, the relation between body and soul, and how to live fully in the present moment.
Anthony Wilson works in teacher and medical education at the University of Exeter where he is a member of the Centre for Research in Writing. He is the author of Lifesaving Poems (Bloodaxe, 2015) and Love for Now (Impress Books, 2012), a memoir of cancer. The Afterlife is his fifth collection of poems.
“In these affecting, graceful poems, Anthony Wilson takes time to reflect on a life: ‘We cannot grasp what we have been given, or can give back’ and so offers his reader an essential book of (re)discovery, encounter and a true value of the present.” – Rebecca Goss
“Anthony Wilson’s poems are often meditative and always very, very readable, but don’t be fooled; the avuncular voice belies a restless interrogation of faith, love and loss, and Wilson moves from moments of everyday comedy to a wounded reckoning with the afterlife of cancer survival and poems of intense anger and grief.” – Fiona Benson