The Sealed Well by Matthew Caley
Matthew Caley has seven collections (mostly Bloodaxe), and a previous pamphlet with Blueprint, Prophecy is Easy (2023), in which poems from the French Modernists/Surrealists acted as a starting point. The poets who inspired Prophecy, however, were all male, stemming mainly from a 1950s collection edited by Wallace Fowlie. The Sealed Well takes on the challenge of discovering female poets writing in the late 19th and early 20th century, and using their work (in translation) as a starting point. No easy task, given that many anthologies of this time were of male poets only, but, as Matthew says in his introduction, ‘we're in a cultural moment where such injustices are being rectified.’ The poems in this pamphlet are complex, layered, intricate, like the lives led by the original poets, but also fresh and light, crisp and bubbling, given a second fermentation, a prise de mousse.
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