Poetry
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One of the most important links I have is with Carcanet Press, whose Managing Director (and the editor of PNReview) is Michael Schmidt. The image (left; photo: Fergus Wilde) shows how Michael treats his authors.
Carcanet have published five of my volumes of poems (Time Signatures, 1993; Not Only I, 1996; The Country of Perhaps, 2003) together with Old English Poems and Riddles (2008), and have recently published a new full-length collection, Polder (July, 2009). I've also contributed essays and reviews to PNReview for many years (since 1983). Carcanet will also publish the Selected Poems in 2011.
For more information on Carcanet Press, and on PNReview, please click on www.carcanet.co.uk/
Together with Rachel Beckett, Michael and I function as Directors of the Modern Literary Archives Project (MLAP) in the John Rylands University Library, Manchester. The MLAP, whose chief archivist is Stella Halkyard, is a significant repository of literary archives, including the archives of Norman Nicholson, dom sylvester houedard, Grevel Lindop, and many others (including the papers of one Chris McCully). The archives of PNReview and Critical Quarterly are part of the collections. A recent and very important acquisition are the papers of the poet Elaine Feinstein. In truth there are very few 20th and 21st century poets whose work isn't represented in the MLAP, and the remit of the project also extends to important collections of material relating to film (the Robert Donat archive) and modern and contemporary art.
The MLAP is partly searchable (given the extent of the material, cataloguing the papers, and turning them into electronically searchable links, will take a lifetime). You can find out more about all the literary archives of the John Rylands Library by clicking on http://rylibweb.man.ac.uk/data2/spcoll/ and/or on http://archives.li.man.ac.uk
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The year turning
The year turning
Again is republican:
Church-clocks frozen
By the parched chemistry
Of indifferent hungers
And the spiders’ rigging
Hanging on shed-spars
In cords of ice.
As the raindrops starve
In no-time, melt
An hour on a mainstay
And become frail,
Tears run down ropes
While the spiders sail
Towards the zero regions
Whose god’s unslaked.
Water so glazed
By snow can’t give
Sky to itself.
There are no views.
And the great trees,
By thirst satisfied,
Have cast their ermines
Into the ditch of winter.
(unpublished poem from workbooks, 2010; ©Chris McCully)
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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...or perhaps, to abandon.
This collection of poems has sold modestly, but it's still selling, and that is something.
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'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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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?
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Polder has this year (2009) appeared from Carcanet. 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.
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