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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An excellent review of to To Abandon Wizardry went online in Stride Magazine on 11 June 2024. Read in full here.
'The games Caley plays with simile and metaphor, the word-play, the close observation and the startling timeshifts all create a surface texture that can resemble Surrealism but which usually turns out to be based on a close observation of reality, or, as the poem put it, 'existence without plot' (the bay tree tells the coffee-drinker to 'steal / god's breath'). As Gide said of Henri Michaux, Caley 'excels in making us feel the strangeness of natural things and the naturalness of strange things.' However much one reads Matthew Caley's poems, I suspect one will always be pulling something new from them.' – Dominic Rivron, Stride Magazine, on To Abandon Wizardry
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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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Interviews with Amali Gunasekera and Matthew Caley are on Hastings Online Times here. They were interviewed ahead of a joint reading at Hastings Bookshop on 13 April 2024.
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FORTHCOMING EVENTS
Thursday 5th June, 8pm
Utter! Lutonia: June
Hat Factory Arts Centre, 65-67 Bute Street, LutonLU1 2EY
Having recently published his 7th collection To Abandon Wizardry Matthew Caley brings his wise and witty work to Luton for the first time and Tessa Foley, who lived in Luton for a time in her childhood, makes her Luton debut with her third collection Try To Find Me. Sean O'Brien brings . . . something, musical likely, but he'll not be tied down, which is just the way we like it . . . and Kid Kirby is similarly indefineable and marvellous. The bill is completed by Susan Evans and local artivist Liz Aldous.
£6/£4 concession - more details online here.
6th - 8th June 2025
Aberystwyth Poetry Festival
The Bookshop By The Sea, 7 Market Street, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, Wales, UK
Matthew Caley will be reading at this year's Aberystwyth Poetry Festival.
More details to follow soon here.
1st-3rd September 2025
20Th International Novi Sad Literature Festival, Serbia, 2025
Youth DIgital Centre, Vojvode Putnika 1
Matthew Caley returns to the Novi Sad Literature Festival to represent the UK for the thrid time alongside Julian Stannard.
More details to follow.
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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]
