Chris McCully

Welcome to these web pages. Chris's work spans poems, essays, reviews, memoirs, textbooks...and a great deal of work about (fly-) fishing. In 2008-09 several new books by Chris will appear: Old English Poems and Riddles (translator, 2008); Sketches with Fishing Rods (2008, with illustrations by Ad Swier); The Sound Structure of English (2009); Polder (poems, 2009); and Pike Lures (2009).

In 2010-12 further titles authored or co-edited by Chris appear, including Analysing Older English (co-edited, CUP), a Selected Poems from Carcanet (2011) and From the Last Sane Places on Earth (probably 2013, also from Carcanet).

Diffugere nives, redeunt iam gramina campis
arboribusque comae;
mutat terra vices et descrescentia ripas
flumina praetereunt....

The snows are fled away, leaves on the shaws
And grasses in the mead renew their birth,
The river to the river-bed withdraws,
And altered is the fashion of the earth....

(Horace, opening of Ode VII, Book IV, trans. A.E. Housman)

[Image: Chris McCully and The Medlar Press, 2008.]

Chris has also contributed to many anthologies of prose and/or verse, most recently to Writing Your Self, edited by Myra Schneider and John Killick (2009), and to a wonderful set of fishing essays and stories, Powerlines, edited by Dexter Petley (Ullapool: Two Ravens Press, also 2009).

[Cover image: copyright Carcanet Press, 2009.]

These days, up to half of my working life involves angling or angling-related work. Among the journals in which I published in 2005-08 are Trout and Salmon, Waterlog, Fly-fishing and Fly-Tying, Journal of the Grayling Society, and Vissen (Amsterdam). In 2007 I published my first full-length feature article in Dutch, in the journal De Roofvis ('The Predator') - see 'Expeditie naar Groenland' in issue number 60. This article is about fishing for charr in river systems near Kangerlussuaq and Nuuk.

In 2008 I completed three feature articles about sea-trout fishing in different parts of the west of Ireland (Donegal, Mayo, Kerry), and four (possibly five) pieces about different English streams, which I visited as part of the absurdly protracted angling celebrations for my 50th birthday. I enjoyed every minute. I hope that this work will appear in Trout and Salmon during 2009. During 2009, too, I'm also looking forward to continuing to fish for sea-trout in Denmark and Ireland.

Pike fishing - all methods, but with a strong inclination towards fishing big streamers where feasible - occupies the winter half of the angling year, and, since I moved to het Hogeland in 2007, zander feature increasingly in these catches.

The Fishing Diary here includes entries on pike and zander; pike lures and streamers; fly-casting; sea-trout; grayling; middle-aged exhaustion; a carp on the fly-rod; some literature and tackle reviews; pictures of Denmark and Ireland; plenty about fly-tying; a picture of a boy sitting on a rock; and other...stuff...that shouldn't really occur to any adult who embraces mens sana in corpore sano.

Note: please feel free to download, share or cite anything in these pages, including photos. If you do so, however, please include an acknowledgement of the source in the new context, eg. 'Text: Chris McCully, 2009' or 'Photo: James Sadler, 2009'. You'll find that many images already have both captions and acknowledgements, and so will be able to cite the source accurately. Please not that otherwise-unattributed photos are invariably my own. Thank you.

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