Poetry
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Polder was published in 2009. The work is in four parts: (i) a longish prose-poem, 'Dust'; (ii) some shorter lyrics; (iii) 'Masterpieces' (poems in dialogue with some of the paintings hanging in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam); and (iv) the 'Torquatus' poems. These last are again in dialogue with an eminent Roman lawyer, a friend of the great poet Horace who is mentioned in the 7th poem of the 4th book of Odes. And why did I address these poems to Torquatus? Out of a sense of exile and dislocation I simply borrowed an imaginary friend. I must admit that everyone has seemed to enjoy the 'Torquatus' poems, and they are sometimes even requested at readings, which touches me greatly. The Country of Perhaps was published in 2003. It includes a number of short lyric poems, including award-winning pieces ('Fishermen on Santa Monica Pier'), along with the full text of 'Mass', a piece that took me seven years to complete. 'Not Only I' appeared in 1996. I worry sometimes about this collection of poems. Technically-speaking it contains pieces that are among my most sophisticated, but thematically it seems to me now that the collection reads as a somewhat remorseless selection of pieces about love and loss. I suspect that, encouraged by the reception of 'Time Signatures' three years earlier, I was trying too hard, and rushing work into print which would have been better kept and re-worked - or simply junked. Nevertheless, there are single pieces here of which I'm still fond, and I'm quite astonished by my apparent virtuosity - many of whose techniques I seem, ten years on, to have quite forgotten. If I'm being kind, I murmur the phrase '...bravura performance...' If I'm being myself, and therefore grumpy, I murmur the phrase '...just showing off....' |
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Chris published his first poem under the 'Gardening' column of the Scarborough Mercury in 1975. In 1982 he began an association with Carcanet Press that has lasted until today. 
Old English Poems and Riddles was published by Fyfield Books, a Carcanet imprint, in 2008. Strangely, this little volume has generated more controversy, and has sold better, than much of my other work in verse. Included in the text are some of the great elegies as well as epics and riddles, and I also translated some sections from Beowulf. One or two critics have queried why I didn't translate the whole of the poem. I can only reply that two great friends of mine were then currently working on their own translations of Beowulf, and I thought they had a prior claim, as it were, to the whole poem. There was also the matter of my own limitations. Translating all of Beowulf would be, for me, the poetic equivalent of climbing K2 or playing Beethoven's Op. 111. That is, I suspect it would be too big and exhausting for me. But who knows? 
The Poet's Voice and Craft published 1994 (ed). 'How does a poet go about writing poetry? Chris McCully, himself a poet and teacher of poetry, put this question to thirteen of Britain's most distinguished practitioners, who discuss in these informal essays the techniques of writing poetry, how they structure their writing-the choice of words, sounds (phonology), metrics (or non-metrics), and some of the processes of poetic genesis and re-writing.' (jacket quote)
The year turning
....But what to do? You ask the wrong magician.
Contact me on chris.mccully@inbox.com