Matthew Caley – författare

Throughout Rake, Matthew Caley's fifth collection, it can appear as if we are glimpsing into the oblique diary of an immortal time-travelling rake, one who is seeking his 'one true beloved' through an heroic tally of amorous encounters, desperately trying to get beyond appetite - or possibly an entire pack [proper collective noun] of immortal time-travelling rakes. Or maybe someone imagining themselves to be such a rake, having drunk too many espressos. Be that as it may, what results is a series of beautifully skewed, left-field, back-handed love poems. Throughout, the forms used are equally promiscuous - tanka, sonnets, refrains, poems sifted from or alluding to Les Liaisons Dangereuses or Barthes' Lover's Discourse, versions of Baudelaire, Bonnefoy and Corbiere, an 'echo sonnet', sonnet-strings, mono-rhymers, a 'tonnet' - hybrid of sonnet and tanka - and most frequently, tanka used as a run-on stanza-unit. Throughout the boudoirs of La Belle Epoch, 80s Cold War Russia, ancient Egypt and the Wild West to London 1910 or LA in the 90s, but more often than not from these locations to the 24 hour neon of the contemporary city and back again in a micro-second - desire feeds lack [and vice-versa] yet yearns for escape.

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, one who is seeking his ‘one true beloved’ through an heroic tally of amorous encounters, desperately trying to get beyond appetite; 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. The forms used are equally promiscuous: tanka, sonnets, refrains, poems sifted from or alluding to Les Liaisons dangereuses or Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, versions of Baudelaire, Bonnefoy and Corbière, an ‘echo sonnet’, sonnet-strings, mono-rhymers, a ‘tonnet’ - hybrid of sonnet and tanka - and, most frequently, tanka used as a run-on stanza unit. Traversing the boudoirs of La Belle Époque, 80s Cold War Russia, ancient Egypt and the Wild West, to London 1910 or LA in the 1990s, but more often than not from these locations to the 24 hour neon of the contemporary city and back again in a micro-second, desire feeds lack (and vice versa) yet yearns for escape. What results is a series of beautiful, back-handed love poems.

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, 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.

To Abandon Wizardry, Matthew Caley's seventh collection, 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.Set within this almost parallel world, To Abandon Wizardry features a long central poem where someone enjoys an alfresco Americano in Shadwell, London, while in dialogue with a mesh-protected sapling that transmits all the polyglot talk of the city. Either side of this we encounter revenants, disembowelled wizards, talking horses and flying houses, as the book forges its aesthetic out of the simulation, hyper-association, and over-stimulation of living in the 21st century. And it's all true.

Pop Fiction''s unique essays individually consider one song within a cinematic context. Unlike previous collected volumes about pop music in film, where a generalised approach has been adopted, this offers instead a close examination of two pervasive and significant mediums in combination.The collection introspects, assembling the pop song into various guises and documenting how individuals dissemble the multiple roles that the pop song plays in cinematic moments. The song as: role-play, memory trigger, narrator, ghost, marketing device, translator, alienator, membership rite etc.Within this tight structure, an international range of authorities from film, musicology, audio-visual design, contemporary art, cultural studies, sociology, and marketing.All provide fresh insight towards the inter-textual fusion of film and song. Additionally the books form reduces the area of analysis to expose differences and similarities between these contrasting fields of study.Innovative yet accessible, this exciting document would appeal to students, lecturers and researchers offering a diverse set of models with which to investigate the ''ideogram'' of image/text/sound—a relationship which sits at the heart of most cultural production. For beginners, the book provides comforting areas of familiarity (pop song and film) while exploring areas of respective discipline and inter-disciplinary practice in an original manner.

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 poems luxuriate in the fabulous lie. Apparently.