Overview

To Abandon Wizardry, Matthew Caley's seventh collection, speeds through a world where it's harder and harder to tell what's 'real' and what's not.Where our political and cultural reality seems so unbelievable, we search for a plot and find one that comes from the Harry Potter playbook. Our sky proves CGI, our touchstones AI. Our screens full of wonders, our streets full of decay. We could nod at Deep Fake, QAnon, fake news versus the 'truth' of official news, all manner of waning national myth or ponder the elsewhere we always think of escaping to, that will no doubt prove equally illusory. Set within this almost parallel world, To Abandon Wizardry features a long central poem where someone enjoys an alfresco Americano in Shadwell, London, while in dialogue with a mesh-protected sapling that transmits all the polyglot talk of the city. Either side of this we encounter revenants, disembowelled wizards, talking horses and flying houses. To Abandon Wizardry forges its aesthetic out of the simulation, hyper-association, and over-stimulation of living in the 21st Century. And it's all true.

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9781780376752

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Reviews

Chief among contemporary British poets, Caley takes seriously the vision of synaesthetic abundance laid out in Stephane Mallarmé’s seminal essay ‘Crisis of Verse’… Caley is a great poet of transposition and vibration…at his very best, an offhand philosopher and bard of the demi-monde, gently blowing our minds. -- Dai George * Poetry Wales, on Trawlerman’s Turquoise * The humour and playfulness... shows off Caley's carefree ability to draw lines across time and space. It also feels profoundly European - a poetry in which borders do not exist, and we are all reflected in this multicultural, pan-historical vision. -- Chrissy Williams * Poetry London, on Trawlerman’s Turquoise * Matthew Caley’s sixth collection Trawlerman’s Turquoise is a steer through linguistic rapids – the effect is dizzying, and psychedelic. One is left with the sense that some new order has been made manifest…in Caley’s intoxicated world the urban becomes urbane, lexicon turns lyrical. -- Cheryl Moskowitz * Magma *

Chief among contemporary British poets, Caley takes seriously the vision of synaesthetic abundance laid out in Stephane Mallarme's seminal essay 'Crisis of Verse'... Caley is a great poet of transposition and vibration...at his very best, an offhand philosopher and bard of the demi-monde, gently blowing our minds. -- Dai George * Poetry Wales, on Trawlerman's Turquoise * The humour and playfulness... shows off Caley's carefree ability to draw lines across time and space. It also feels profoundly European - a poetry in which borders do not exist, and we are all reflected in this multicultural, pan-historical vision. -- Chrissy Williams * Poetry London, on Trawlerman's Turquoise * Matthew Caley's sixth collection Trawlerman's Turquoise is a steer through linguistic rapids - the effect is dizzying, and psychedelic. One is left with the sense that some new order has been made manifest...in Caley's intoxicated world the urban becomes urbane, lexicon turns lyrical. -- Cheryl Moskowitz * Magma *

Author Information

Matthew Caley's Thirst (Slow Dancer, 1999) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and followed by The Scene of My Former Triumph (Wrecking Ball Press, 2005), Apparently (Bloodaxe Books, 2010); his lost second collection, Professor Glass (Donut Press, 2011); and his later collections, Rake (Bloodaxe Books, 2016), Trawlerman's Turquoise (Bloodaxe Books, 2019) and To Abandon Wizardry (Bloodaxe Books, 2023). His work has been included in many anthologies, including Roddy Lumsden's Identity Parade (Bloodaxe Books, 2010) and John Stammers' Picador Book of Love Poems. He has also co-edited Pop Fiction: The Song in Cinema with Stephen Lannin (Intellect, 2005). He lives in London with artist Pavla Alchin and their two daughters.

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