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To Abandon Wizardry, Matthew Caley's seventh collection, speeds through 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.
To Abandon Wizardry forges its aesthetic out of the simulation, hyper-association, and over-stimulation of living in the 21st Century. And it's all true.
"The humour and playfulness... shows off Caley's carefree ability to draw lines across time and space. It also feels profoundly European - a poetry in which borders do not exist, and we are all reflected in this multicultural, pan-historical vision."—Chrissy Williams, Poetry London
‘… the technical resources deployed remain consistently highly coloured and deft in execution. A tanka-derived syllabic structure for stanzas predominates, but a multitude of other forms are used with intelligent grace…I know that it is the verve of Caley’s writing I will be re-reading.’ – Ian McEwen, Magma, on Rake
‘Decidedly indecorous, Caley's vocabulary pricks his readers to keep the action anachronistic and contemporary… the book is a Waste Land of sorts, punctuated with Pound-like fragments…carefully [meticulously] crafted.’ – Edwina Attlee, The Poetry Review, on Rake
'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 … 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
13 The Vulnerable
14 The Archipelagos
16 Bagatelle
17 The Nit Pickers
18 Lynx Litter
19 Luxor
21 The Blunderbuss
23 The Leaf
25 Approaches to a Door
27 The Strop
29 The Spill
30 Wispy Streamers
31 Pabl Piccass
32 Aphid Says
34 Canton for the Stranded
35 The Tickle
36 I Conjured up a Horse
38 Lamantia Street
40 The Scarf
41 from Transmitter
63 Undescended Testicles
64 The Obligations
66 Double-hooped Earrings
67 The Unbalanced
68 Unicorn Street
70 The Confessional
71 from The Drifting Recidivist Says
74 Plume Travelling
76 The Bungalow
78 Horse in the Sea Mist
81 This Pure Child
82 The Height
83 Star-wheel
84 Fusillade
85 Canton for the Wastrel
86 Depot of the Aero-houses
88 The Weathervane
89 Bollo’s Brook
92 The Lynx
94 epilogue