Autobiology

Autobiology by Keith Caddy is a spare, direct collection that treats memory as a case file, returning to formative scenes with a cool-eyed tenderness and a willingness to name what hurts. Across poems of rural childhood, school cruelty, family illness, and workaday humiliation, Caddy's writing keeps its language plain but charged, allowing images to do the work, whether a kite dying on a blood-stained moor, a chicken's throat slit over a drain, or a boy replaying his sister's imagined 'hundred deaths' after a near miss with a bus. What emerges is a forensic lyric of classed upbringing and adult reckoning, where shame, violence, and love sit close together, and where compassion often arrives too late to change the facts, but not too late to change how they are held.