Dancing in the Lone Star Diner

Caley, Matthew

Slow Dancer Press

A series of beautiful, back-handed love poems traversing the boudoirs of La Belle poque, 80s Cold War Russia, ancient Egypt, and the Wild West, to London 1910 or LA in the 1990s. Throughout Rake, Matthew Caley's fifth collection, it can appear as if we are leafing through the oblique diary of an immortal time-travelling rake; or possibly a number of parallel immortal time-travelling rakes; or maybe even someone, having drunk too many espressos, imagining themselves to be such a rake.

Rake

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Bloodaxe Books

Trawlerman'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.

Trawlerman's Turquoise

Every poem in Matthew Caley's Apparently begins - or occasionally ends - with the word 'apparently'. In conversation this word usually precedes a scurrilous piece of gossip or hearsay, allowing the speaker to voice what cannot be substantiated, for in our increasingly mediated world, what is "apparent" often has more authority than "what actually is". From this instantly split beginning, a poem might extol glaciers and cult post-punk singers, mishear W.B. Yeats, get drunk, argue with Roman consuls, empathise with Roadrunner, crash several vehicles, chronicle a parallel Proust, or watch Jon Snow lose his equilibrium. There are odes to dead flies, obscure Western actors, Louis Zukofsky and the pancreas. Or are there? It's not that the poems are about these things so much as that these things get caught up in each poem's need to be. Through this can be glimpsed the self fighting the self, desire and darker intimations. Against any notion of "poetic truth" these poemsluxuriate in the fabulous lie. Apparently.

Apparently

Bloodaxe Books Ltd.

Thirst is a melange of wit, intellect and microscopic observation, all served up with coolly surreal imagination as it muses on the relationship between a romantic sensibility and the modern city. Along the way drunkenness is explored as metaphor and reality; childhood, religion and sex are dealt with from oblique angles; and both Man Ray's mistress and the poet Marianne Moore contribute monologues from The Great Beyond.

Thirst (Slow Dancer Poetry)

Dufour Editions