Adventures in poetry
Publication date: June 7th 2014
ISBN: 9780992758912
Price: £8.99
Richie McCaffery’s debut collection of poems, Cairn, begins in dedication and ends with ghosts – in between lie artefacts and antiquities: a police whistle, a tarnished silver spoon, a bookmark lodged in an old book. These poems find their stories in the overlooked spaces of everyday, and take delight in the unexpected image and turn of phrase. Soaring, short and melancholy, the poems form signposts in the landscape of life, lore and family, mementoes for the buried and the living.
Cairn is an understated and quietly-brilliant collection of poems, where each word is tactile and polished like a beach-combed pebble; these are poems you’ll want to pocket and treasure.
"When you enter McCaffery's world, objects are no longer inanimate, drawers are filled with stories, desks are cluttered with moments of grace. A beautiful, and powerful, collection of poetry" - William Letford
"McCaffrey is a skilled, sure-footed poet, opening the inanimate objects of the world to show how they echo with voices inside. A pen, a writing slope, a whistle, a plastic football, each traps significance like sunlight and reveals how we are connected to the world equally by what it gives us and what it takes away. These are poems filled with light and rain, moving and celebratory- a remarkable collection, and one to be treasured." - John Glenday
Richie McCaffery (b. 1986) lives in Stirling and studies and works as a teaching assistant at The University of Glasgow. He is working on a PhD in Scottish Literature, looking at the Scottish poets of World War Two. He is the author of two poetry pamphlets, Spinning Plates (HappenStance Press, 2012) and Ballast Flint (Cromarty Arts Trust, 2013). His poems have appeared in journals and anthologies such as The Dark Horse, Stand, The Rialto and The Best British Poetry 2012.
Photo credit: Gerry Cambridge