Trawlerman's Turquoise

By Matthew Caley

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Sep 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9781780374895

Book preview

MATTHEW CALEY

TRAWLERMAN’S TURQUOISE

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.

‘Colloquial enough to keep you reading, yet complex enough to keep you uncomfortable…the reader is aware of something strange and beautiful.’ – Emma Hammond, Poetry London, on Rake

‘Decidedly indecorous, Caley’s vocabulary pricks his readers to keep the action anachronistic and contemporary’ – Edwina Attlee, The Poetry Review

Cover photograph by Pavla Alchin

MATTHEW CALEY

Trawlerman’s

Turquoise

for Pavla, Iris and Mina as always

and i.m. Robert Growka

[and for all my enemies –

if only I could remember who you are]

poets tend to incarnate by the side of ocean, at least in vision, if inland far they be. Or if some blocking agent excludes any glimpse of that immortal sea, various surrogates readily enough are found

HAROLD BLOOM

, A Map of Misreading

I am become

dumb

in answer

to your dead language of amor

MINA LOY

, ‘Letters of the Un-living’

Yeats tried another tactic. Sitting at a table with his long arm stretched out before him, he bent down to try to communicate through telepathy. Suddenly his arm began to tremble and throb as if under the influence of the machine, which gratifyingly appeared to obey commands to stop and start. But no more words emerged.

BRENDA MADDOX

, Yeats’s Ghosts: The Secret Life of W.B. Yeats

But it seems to me that the effects of, the products of, human intelligence, are almost biological functions, you know, like the urine of dogs that’s full of information for other dogs. There is an almost excremental, in the most innocent and noble sense, aspect to what we do, to our droppings.

JAMES MERRILL

, from Twentieth-Century Literature (Winter 1992), interview by C.A. Buckley

I’ve come