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.
 
About Keith Caddy:
Keith Caddy is from Cornwall where he still lives. After a succession of roles as a clerk, a miner, a salesman and a loan shark, he gave up and became a teacher. He has written poetry all his life as well as song lyrics, plays and short fiction. This first collection of poetry explores events from his life and attempts to dissect them with a touch of forensic reflection. He hopes that, although being personal, the words have universal appeal.