Overview

Trawlerman's Turquoise, Matthew Caley's sixth collection, features various seemingly recherche elements telepathy, Madame Blavatsky, epistolary novels, muse worship, Balzac's coffee addiction and Thomas Merton's accidental electrocution amongst them not always as straightforward 'subject matter', but caught up in the backdraft of the poems' acceleration. The book's title derives from the long, central, hyper-associative poem, 'from The Foldings' trawlerman's turquoise being a phrase to describe a psychic glimpse of the ocean for perennial inner-city dwellers, who have only ever heard rumour of one. Caley's lyrics and love poems are poised between sincerity and its inverse, and a seeming 'parallel world', which gradually emerges, sits at odds with, and sheds light on, the current state of our actual world full of melting borders, random dangers, shifting identities, misread communiques, false reports and information overload destabilising and exhilarating in equal measure.

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9781780374888

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Reviews

Decidedly indecorous, Caley's vocabulary pricks his readers to keep the action anachronistic and contemporary... the book is a Waste Land of sorts, punctuated with Pound-like fragments...carefully [meticulously] crafted. -- Edwina Attlee * The Poetry Review, on Rake * A series of densely written love poems in which the reader is aware of something strange and beautiful (and perhaps a little dishonest) going on behind the scenes... It is this sense of play that makes the poems so striking, as well as the tightly reigned undertones of kitsch... Rake seems to have created a brow of its own, colloquial enough to keep you reading, yet complex enough to keep you uncomfortable...the reader is aware of something strange and beautiful. -- Emma Hammond * Poetry London * Formally outrageous, culturally light-fingered, Caley's vision and wit make for poems that turn a wondrous, great lamp on the inter-relatedness of all things. An important poet. -- John Stammers

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 fifth and sixth collection, Rake (Bloodaxe Books, 2016) and Trawlerman's Turquoise (Bloodaxe Books, 2019). 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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