Collected Contraptions

McCarey Peter

Peter McCarey's first full collection, comprising work from his five pamphlets, is an exhilarating journey on the U-bahns and runways of language: "In a matter of hours / they can take you anywhere". Collected Contraptions opens with water, rain and shadows; the inscription of "the singer's mark" from the lost language of the Indus Valley civilisation shines from a Shakespeare sonnet; we are caught in a sci-fi spaghetti Western; a shady Czech smuggles a golem and a robot into pre-massacre Rwanda. Language shape-shifts, reinvents itself, before going on another road trip where stories are recited backwards and fast forward. Last is "Tantris", an epic of intricate narrative whose message couldn't be more simple: "Don't go: don't let the morning / Turn your head with her shivering, thin grace".

About the Author

Peter McCarey was born in Paisley in 1956 and brought up in Glasgow. He has studied and worked in Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. In 1988 he moved with his family to Geneva. His major audiovisual work "The Syllabary", a poem he has been composing since the mid-1990s, can be found at www.thesyllabary.com. Cleikit, a large audio visual collaboration, can be found on www.cleikit.com.

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