Search results for ""author richie mccaffery""

Exploring place and displacement, boundaries and borders, Passport is the second collection by Richie McCaffery, and follows his acclaimed debut Cairn (Nine Arches Press, 2014). In moving to the Belgian city of Ghent, McCaffery finds “What I see and what happens / are two different countries.” In a place of dualities and unrealities, the poems find the usual definitions themselves becoming unstable; the old currency that is no longer valid, the postcards home unsent and the present tense ill at ease.Written in crisp detail, these fluent poems weigh up whether leaving is a form of running from or coming back to home, wherever that may be. At the heart of this tender and compelling collection, McCaffery writes directly of anxiety, loss and dislocation, asking us to consider what belonging is, and how we find our place in life, in love, and in language.

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Richie McCaffery's debut collection of poems, Cairn, begins in a dedication and ends with ghosts - in between lies hoards of artefacts and long-forgotten antiquities; a police whistle, a tarnished silver spoon, the bookmark lodged in a boring book decades before that sings of a lost age. These poems find their stories in the overlooked places of everyday, and take utter delight in the unexpected image and turn of phrase. Soaring, often short and bitter-sweet, the poems form markers in the landscape of love, lore and family, making mementoes to the buried and the living.Richie McCaffery (b. 1986) lives in Stirling and studies and works as a teaching assistant at The University of Glasgow. He is the author of two poetry pamphlets, Spinning Plates (HappenStance Press, 2012) and Ballast Flint (Cromarty Arts Trust, 2013). His poems have appeared in journals and anthologies such as The Dark Horse, Stand, The Rialto and The Best British Poetry 2012.

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