Richie McCaffery
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Breviloquent power: ‘House on the A34’ by Philip Hancock
Richie McCaffery House on the A34, Philip Hancock’s second collection with CB editions, is a book of breviloquent but powerful poems, carefully constructed with a craftsman-like attention to detail about the neglected and the interstitial. Take, for instance, the proud but also poignant character study of ‘Old Bruce’: Holding up trafficby walking in the road,still…
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A Romantic two centuries late: ‘The Ghost Net’ by Alan Jenkins
Richie McCaffery The Ghost Net is Alan Jenkins’s eighth book-length collection and the first full collection from New Walk Editions, marking a very auspicious new venture for the press which began by producing elegant, quality poetry pamphlets and grew out of the much admired and missed poetry magazine, New Walk. From the collection title onwards…
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Two poems by Richie McCaffery
Image © Gerry Cambridge Scrap Your last words to me were written, not spoken,a paper cut severing us and our shared 14 yearsbecause you felt it was for the good of us both,how your happiness lay beyond this sacrifice. Two years on I hope your forecast proved true,it didn’t for me. I kept your letter…
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On ‘High Desert’ by André Naffis-Sahely
Richie McCaffery It’s been a long time since I enjoyed a collection of poetry as much as André Naffis-Sahely’s new offering, High Desert (Bloodaxe, 2022). That said, ‘enjoy’ isn’t quite the mot juste, for while there is at times dark humour here, these are unapologetically serious poems about serious subjects. Perhaps it’s…
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Three pamphlets reviewed by Richie McCaffery
Richie McCaffery It is apt that John Greening recently edited the Carcanet selection of Iain Crichton Smith’s poems. There’s an anecdote that does the rounds in Scottish literary circles, probably apocryphal, which goes: Norman MacCaig was walking down the street in Edinburgh and he sees a friend, so he stops them and…
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Two poems by Richie McCaffery
Photo by Shapelined on Unsplash Games Each week it was the same – the PE teacher would pick his captains for the football game and each week they were the same. It always struck me as odd, how the subject was called ‘Games’ when there was no fun in…
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On ‘Corrigenda for Costafine Town’ by Jake Morris-Campbell
Richie McCaffery The first edition of Alasdair Gray’s debut collection of short stories (Unlikely Stories, Mostly) carries with it a little snippet of paper saying ‘Erratum: This slip has been inserted by mistake’. A wee postmodern gimmick, but a funny one nonetheless. Copies of this book are rare nowadays with that original…
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Three poems by Richie McCaffery
© Gerry Cambridge Dead man’s beer They were bundled in a bag for life in the garage, thirty yellow-black tins of Boddingtons like a nest of wasps, their presence stinging his widow. I got the job of retrieving and drinking them. It took me a week to work through the lot…
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Remembering Alexander Hutchison (1943-2015)
Richie McCaffery I told him (hoping to impress him) that I wanted to write an article on his poetry. He rolled his eyes and let out a half-hearted ‘Whoopee’… We both laughed, although I was a little miffed, and then forgot all about it. This was sometime in 2013, I was doing…
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Private Morgan: World War Two & Edwin Morgan’s ‘The New Divan’
© Jessie Ann Matthew, National Galleries Scotland Richie McCaffery While many of Edwin Morgan’s (1920-2010) Scottish near contemporaries in poetry, such as Hamish Henderson and Sorley MacLean, wrote immediate, resonant and powerful work about their active experiences in North Africa during World War Two, it was not until 1977, when Carcanet published Morgan’s…
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Four poems by Richie McCaffery
© Gerry Cambridge Inversnaid (for Chris Powici, & i.m. Helen Lamb) The time I visited him before this he still had a partner and I had leave to be with mine. He takes me on endless walks in the hills and glens, like a dog being exhausted so it sleeps,…