Niall O'Sullivan reviews Matthew Caley's The Scene of My Former Triumph

This review appeared in the November 2005 issue of The Wolf, issue 11, under a heading that paired it with a notice of the anthology Reactions 5: New Poetry. Niall O'Sullivan writes here about Matthew Caley's collection The Scene of My Former Triumph, published by Wrecking Ball Press at 7.99 pounds.

O'Sullivan opens by calling Caley a poet's poet, and suggests his appeal is narrower still. His wide vocabulary and constant nods to art and literature should please academics, he says, while the South London slang and street knowledge could lose them. He pictures the ideal reader as a tattooed city drifter in a run-down cafe or pub, leafing through Voltaire or Frieze magazine. Caley's early champion Ken Smith is named, and the reviewer notes that Caley was twice a runner-up in the National Poetry Competition and that the Forward Prize nominated his first collection, Thirst. A mischievous remark follows: had he written a pastoral idyll or a solemn tribute to the dead of the Somme, he would already be buried under laurels.

The close reading starts two poems into the new book, with a squatters' tale of arguing lovers and threadbare carpet that name-checks Frida Kahlo, Alistair Crowley, Manet, Courbet and the band The Soup Dragons. O'Sullivan quotes a passage in which the poet insists on noting the rotting details of a stairwell, down to each blister of paint, and reads it as a manifesto that carries into other poems. He then turns to 'Ammonius Saccus', where a reader working through classical philosophy is reminded of his sinus troubles and of the night bus and the car alarm outside. He takes this as a truth about reading, whether of poetry, philosophy or Heat magazine: whatever a person consumes mentally colours the streets they walk and the people they pass.

Work

The Scene of My Former Triumph

Author

Matthew Caley

Publisher

Wrecking Ball Press

Poems in this selection

• Ammonius Saccus

Matthew Caley has long suffered that curious curse of being a 'poet's poet'

Niall O'Sullivan, The Wolf, issue 11