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Chris McCabe

Chris McCabe

Biography

Chris McCabe was born in Liverpool in 1977. His poetry collections are Speculatrix, The Hutton Inquiry, Zeppelins and THE RESTRUCTURE. He has recorded a CD with the Poetry Archive and has had work included in numerous anthologies includingIdentity Parade: New British and Irish Poets, The Captain's Tower: seventy poets celebrate Bob Dylan at seventyAdventures in Form and Dear World & Everyone in it. His plays Shad Thames, Broken Wharf and Mudflats have been performed in London and Liverpool. He works as the Poetry Librarian at The Saison Poetry Library and teaches for The Poetry School. His work has been described by The Guardian as “an impressively inventive survey of the uses of English in the early 21st century”. His first prose book, In the Catacombs: a Summer Among the Dead Poets of West Norwood Cemetery, was published by Penned in the Margins in July 2014.

Recordings

Bibliography

Books:

  • Speculatrix (London: Penned in the Margins, 2014)
  • THE RESTRUCTURE (Norfolk: Salt Publishing, 2012)
  • Zeppelins (Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2008)
  • The Hutton Inquiry (Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2005)

Prose:

  • In the Catacombs: a Summer Among the Dead Poets of West Norwood Cemetery (London: Penned in the Margins, 2014)

Pamphlets:

  • poems for sale (London: unit4art, 2012)
  • The Borrowed Notebook (Norwich: Landfill, 2009)
  • Matchbox (Manchester: James Davies, 2007)

Play:

Collaborations:

Sample Text

 

from 'Teenage Riot, Daydream Nation'

Riot? Who would do that? Out of bricks? Dreams
would do that, out of bricks, out of skies
they have no bricks, so there are no skies, acts
of dreams, from what I dreamt to what they sd,
for they have no force, their electrics dead,
floats of milk parked (on their side) at dusk,
blue glass, tin can plumbed in white noise,
where should be force, a jack & a plug,
"kiss me in shadow" written on their fists,
You're cut she sd, your electrics out,
cut, cut out. But no, there is no force like the first
time's frost, you touch this echo & this loop,
when you fell the tannoy spoke
FIRE IN SHOPFRONT IN TOTTENHAM HALE
                                ( wind - glass )
no bricks, no riots but acts, acts
of nights, skies made gold, flecked with bricks,
four acts, each act of words, electrics dead,
out, out - no dream is here, no dream is there.
Sez who? These are all my skies, we'll make
red dreams and recognise it with my words,
train our dreams in latticed fields, catch the skies

Reviews

'McCabe upturns not so much the roots and fears of society’s evils but the language which begets, normalizes and justifies them' --Scottish Poetry Review

'The pleasures of the text and of the world seem to defy the powers that be' --Poetry London

'Seems able to casually render huge political topics into small dense lines pregnant with meaning and humour' --Poetry Review

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