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. Throughout 2008-09 several new books by Chris appeared: Old English Poems and Riddles (translator, 2008); Sketches with Fishing Rods (2008, with illustrations by Ad Swier, please see below); The Sound Structure of English (2009); Polder (poems, 2009); and most recently, Fishing and Pike Lures (2009).

In 2010-12 further titles authored or co-edited by Chris appear, including Analysing Older English (co-edited, CUP), Selected Poems from Carcanet (2011) and From the Last Sane Places on Earth (probably 2013, also from Carcanet). Over the same period Chris will also be working on a major new title for The Medlar Press, Irish Sea-Trout: Nomads of the Tides, projected publication 2013 - further details below.

A full list of Chris's book publications will be found by clicking on the 'About Chris' page.

[Image: ©Gardiner Mitchell, 2009.]


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Salting



Snow embossed on tide-litter and time is thirst.

There in the sun-halo the halcyon starves.

Even the liquid of its eye’s freeze-dried;

Even all sound



While light roosts. The salting’s motionless.

Daybreak, smeared out of starlight, animates

Two swans, enduring parched and life-long passion

On their parched ground.



(unpublished poem from work-books, 2010; ©Chris McCully)
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[Image from Sketches with Fishing Rods (2008): Ad Swier, pencil drawing 2008.]

These days, up to half my working and writing life involves angling or angling-related projects. Recent publications incude Ad Swier's Passion for Pike (editor, 2006); Sketches with Fishing Rods (2008) and Fishing and Pike Lures (2009). These books are readily available from Coch-y-Bonddu Books (www.anglebooks.com) . In 2009, together with Ken Whelan and James Sadler, I embarked on a three-year project which will take me on repeated angling visits to Ireland in order to fish for and research the recent history of the Irish breac geal, the white trout (= sea trout). This work was recently put under contract by The Medlar Press (www.medlarpress.com), and projected publication will be in 2013.

I'm lucky enough to publish some work each year in that fine UK angling magazine Trout and Salmon, and have been associated with T&S for what are becoming rather many years. I'm also proud to publish occasional articles in Waterlog (www.waterlogmagazine.com) . Those two journals have become an important part of my angling life.

In a typical year I fish for pike and zander during the later autumn and winter; for sea-trout (in Denmark, Ireland and elsewhere) from late March until the end of September; and whenever possible, for grayling in the earlier part of the autumn. Occasionally, too, I return to my favourite English rivers - in Yorkshire, or the Wessex chalkstreams - to fish for brown trout and grayling. I enjoy that variety, and though I prefer catching all species on the fly-rods I'm by no means averse to catching pike (for example) on streamers, jerkbaits, spinners, plugs, softbaits or deadbaits when conditions and the behaviour of the fish require.

Note: with some minimal though important exceptions, you're 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'. Please note that otherwise-unattributed photos are invariably my own. Finally, do be aware that one or two images remain the copyright of the photographer who took the shot (or of the publishing house which retains the image), and where this is the case I have indicated it, so that no use of the relevant image is possible without obtaining written copyright permission first. Thank you.

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