Richie McCaffery

grandmother

She must be fed words every evening on the phone
and, like her food, they must be bland and soft.

Always the radio on, leaking classical music.
Always the TV blaring away in its corner like a crier.

She has built a fortified wall of sound around her
but the silence is looking for a way in, and is deafening.

hangoverlap

A familiar story, too hungover to work well,
the book gets written in increasingly rarely
but is often used as a coaster for the latest bottle
and this morning there’s a two ring stain

on its cover that overlaps in a Venn diagram
that captures the nothing shared between
the first drink and the next like the soldered
loops of a slack, though strong, chain.

Richie McCaffery is the author of three book-length collections of poetry: Cairn (Nine Arches Press, 2014), Passport (Nine Arches Press, 2018) and Summer / Break (Shoestring Press, 2022). He has also published four pamphlets, including ‘Spinning Plates’ (HappenStance Press, 2012) and ‘First Hare’ (Mariscat Press, 2020). His academic monograph, Scotland’s Harvest: Scottish Poetry and World War Two, was published by Brill in 2023.

Richie wrote the following about his poems:

I’m delighted to have two new poems appearing in The Interpreter’s House, these are ‘Grandmother’ and ‘Hangoverlap’. The first of these, ‘Grandmother’, is about someone going deaf in late age trying to cope with the world the way they know but also the long-suffering responses of their relatives. ‘Hangoverlap’ is about those who drink heavily and know that boozy glasses leave ring marks on tables, books and documents that sometimes overlap like loops in a chain, symbolising the hold of habit, if not addiction.