Book description
Chris McCully's Selected Poems includes work from 1993 to 2009, a
representative selection which reveals his precise craft of language
and poetic form. The book opens with the prose-poem  Dust' from his
2009 collection Polder, a meditation on extinction: Â dust again the
voices of the pages and the voices of the lovers'. Other voices
follow, conversations in which civility, memories of friendship, art
and literature respond to the desolation of dust, asserting what can
be created out of it. In translations from Old English, sonnets,
villanelles and ballads, McCully's supple, sparing verse celebrates
the fragile areas in which we live, Â between space and space Â- / and
both are dark'.
Chris McCully was born in Bradford and now lives and works in the
Netherlands, where he writes poems, textbooks and works on fly-fishing
and gives freelance courses on aspects of using the English language.
For many years he was a full-time academic in the UK, and he remains
chairman and co-director of the Modern Literary Archives programme at
the John Rylands University Library in Manchester. Chris McCully travels
widely, making up to a dozen overseas trips a year in order to write
features for the fly-fishing press in the UK and Netherlands.
