Matthew Caley Readings

Matthew Caley Readings

 

Matthew Caley's seventh collection To Abandon Wizardry was published by Bloodaxe in November 2023. This follows his earlier Bloodaxe collections Trawlerman’s Turquoise (2019) , Rake (2016) and Apparently (2010). 

To Abandon Wizardry explores 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.

Scroll down to watch a video of the joint online launch of 21 November 2023, and to watch the film poem Unicorn Street.

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Matthew Caley was the guest on the A Mouthful of Air podcast of 17 October 2022. He was reading and discussing his poem ‘My Beautiful Comrade from the North’ from Trawlerman’s Turquoise.  Unusually for Matthew, this poem is partially based on a real-life experience. He discussed the extraordinary background to this 'summoning poem', as well as the form of the poem, with host Mark McGuiness. The podcast began and ended with Matthew reading the poem.  Listen via the Mouthful of Air website here

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FORTHCOMING EVENTS

 

Saturday 13 April 2024, 7pm

Matthew Caley, Amali Gunasekera and Abigail Parry

The Hastings Bookshop, 5 Trinity St, Hastings TN34 1HG

Joint reading by three Bloodaxe poets: Matthew Caley, Abigail Parry and Amali Gunasekera.

Free event - more details and booking here.

 

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Unicorn Street: a film poem

Unicorn Street is a film poem made by Jesse Adlam to accompany the poem of the same name from Matthew Caley's seventh collection To Abandon Wizardry (Bloodaxe Books, 2023).  Matthew Caley reads the poem 'Unicorn Street' from which the book takes its title and cover image.

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PAST EVENTS

 

Tuesday 21 November 2023, 7pm GMT, joint livestreamed launch event

Matthew Caley launched his new collection alongside MacGillivray and Abigail Parry at this online event celebrating the publication of their new poetry books.

The poets read live and discussed their work with each other and with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. This free Bloodaxe launch event was streamed on YouTube Live and is now available on our YouTube channel.

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Matthew Caley delivered the StAnza Lecture 2020 - Mother, Mother, Ocean - Modernist Women Poets and The Sea on 5 March 2020.  To tie with this an 'image, text, sound installation' -  a collaboration between Caley and marine biology specialists from St Andrews University - featuring lines from his sixth collection Trawlerman’s Turquoise - was shown throughout the festival. Details of the video poem TRAWL are here.  The video is posted below.

 

       

Excellent reviews of Trawlerman’s Turquoise are in The Lake here and Tentacular Magazine here.


[14 November 2023]


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