Creative Conversations: Matthew Rice

Poet Matthew Rice reading and in conversation

Set during a single twelve-hour night shift in a factory, plastic is a book-length poem exploring the life of the industrial worker turned poet.

Bringing together memoir, ekphrasis and satire, plastic is based on Matthew Rice’s experience working in a plastic moulding factory for ten years. Illustrating alienated twenty-first-century Irish labour in poetic form, plastic engages with the inflictions and implications of a ‘post-industrial’, ‘post-Troubles’ society, all while weaving in depictions of factory work from literature, film and the visual arts.

Time-stamped to highlight the claustrophobia of the worker’s experience, this is a poem about feeling a calling while being submerged in the world of menial labour – making plastic airplane parts by night, making poetry by day, uniting what Jacques Rancière calls the ‘labourers in love with the intellectual nights’ and those ‘intellectuals in love with the toilsome and glorious days of the labouring people.’ plastic’s evocation and lucidity moves with grace through working class realities and hopeful imaginings.

‘Matthew Rice’s plastic goes where poetry seldom does: the factory floor, the canteen, the night shift, and it does so astutely and with insight and grace. This is real and vital work.’
— Nick Laird, author of Up Late

‘In plastic, the hours are “bent out of time” and slowed to their minutes on a factory night shift, where workers are churned in liminal borderlands and clocked by the ever-present spectre of death. Here, the relentless and precarious cycle of avoiding getting fucked over or worse in “far too narrow” circumstances. Rice is attuned to sound, and in these moving, visceral and formally precise poems, we are given dazzling glimpses of whole worlds lying just beyond the relentless tightrope of these dented, “bastarding jobs”. At the outset, the speaker confides: “Really it’s my heart that wakes me”. In this way, genuinely beautiful moments of hope and revelation spring from cracks in the strange and ominous like sparks from a grinder: crisp packets “doin’ the tango”; a smiley on the window; twin hares in an industrial park; machinists as concert pianists in another life, another universe. Rice’s book is one of deep compassion and vulnerability. plastic is 4am light in dark times.’
— Dawn Watson, author of We Play Here

‘plastic confronts the daily realities of work and labour, revealing how the body endures the relentless grind. Yet within these poems are flashes of light, moments of grace and a quiet, fond sensibility. This continuous narrative offers a hopeful, heartfelt reorientation, reminding us of the vitality found in the overlooked lives of many. Surprising, tender and true.’
— Hatty Nestor, co-author of The Aching Poem

Matthew Rice was born in Belfast. Poems have appeared in The Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review and The Forward Book of Poetry 2022 (Faber). He holds an MA in Poetry from Queen’s University, Belfast, and a PhD from The Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s. His debut collection, The Last Weather Observer (Summer Palace Press), was published in 2021 and was included on the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s top ten books of the year.

The Zoom Link to attend online is: https://uofglasgow.zoom.us/j/84847985257

Creative Conversations is supported generously by The Ferguson Bequest. Professor Thomas Ferguson (1900-1977), Henry Mechan Chair of Public Health (1944-64), bequeathed his estate to the University, with the instruction that the money should be used to foster the social side of University life.