Description
Book SynopsisTrawlerman’s Turquoise, Matthew Caley’s sixth collection, features various seemingly recherché 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 communiqués, false reports and information overload – destabilising and exhilarating in equal measure.
Trade ReviewDecidedly 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
Table of Contents9 The Vltava 10 Thaw 13 Stendhal Syndrome 14 In Praise of Turkish Coffee 16 5.00 a.m. 17 Epistolary Novels 19 Aloes Démaquillant 20 Summoning Spell 21 Telepathy 23 Bay Tree on Turner Street 25 from Aphid Soliloquies 27 The Crossing 28 Don’t Touch that Heater 31 Training at Altitude 33 The Pub Crawl [Slight Return] 36 The Level 37 from The Foldings 56 The Trap 58 The Glaziers 59 Line Lengths 60 The Nomads 62 Wake Up 63 Spring Fever 65 And the Horse in Each Movement 67 The Weight 68 The Waterfall 69 Basilisk 70 Meadow Saffrons 72 Slow Blow Job 75 The Truce 76 Dear Directeur 77 My Beautiful Comrade from the North 79 [Prayer for] The Frazzled
