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.
'Matthew Caley's sixth collection Trawlerman's Turquoise is a steer through linguistic rapids - the effect is dizzying, and psychedelic. One is left with the sense that some new order has been made manifest. Here are love poems and eco-poems, references to the modern, the ancient, the internet, the occult, the urban, the everyday; in Caley's intoxicated world the urban becomes urbane, lexicon turns lyrical.' - Cheryl Moskowitz, Magma
'Caley at his very best, an offhand philosopher and bard of the demi-monde, gently blowing our minds.' - Dai George, Poetry Wales
Matthew Caley is a tutor/mentor for the Poetry School and has also recently taught poetry at the University of St Andrews (twice), the University of Winchester and Royal Holloway University, London. His first collection, Thirst (Slow Dancer, 1999), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. He has published six more since, four with Bloodaxe, Apparently (2010), Rake (2016), Trawlerman’s Turquoise (2019) and To Abandon Wizardry (2023). His work has featured in many anthologies, including Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poetry (Bloodaxe Books, 2010), Poems of the Decade (Forward Worldwide, 2011), The Picador Book of Love Poems (Picador, 2011), Pestilence (Lapwing, Belfast, 2020) and Divining Dante (Recent Work Press, 2021). Prophecy Is Easy, a pamphlet of very loose versions from French twentieth century poets, was published by Blueprint in 2021. He’s read his work from StAnza in Fife – where he gave the StAnza Lecture 2020 – to the Globe Theatre, London; from Galway to the Czech Republic, to Novi Sad, Serbia. He lives in London with the Czech-born artist Pavla Alchin. They have two daughters, Iris and Mina.
