Polder

McCully Chris

Polder begins with extinction. The dust that existed from the first instant of creation is the dust to which in the end all creation will return, "sinking under its weight". The prose-poem "Dust' was written when the poet was being treated for alcoholism and began the process of recovery. The collection ends with poems addressed to Torquatus, friend of the Roman poet Horace, a dialogue across centuries that defies the dust and looks back with mixed feelings to the drinking days of ambition, pride, and failure – and celebrates the poet's fiftieth birthday.

In between are other conversations. In 2000 McCully moved to Amsterdam and began to explore the Dutch landscapes, dialects and culture that animate the second section of Polder with faces and voices past and present. In the third, "Masterpieces", works by Vermeer, Rembrandt and other artists displayed in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, are engaged in dialogues that range from the quizzical to the confrontational. The poet tries to find firm ground in a fragile landscape reclaimed from the hungry sea, a home in a place that is not yet home.

About the Author

Chris McCully was born in Bradford, Yorkshire in 1958. He worked as a full-time academic, specialising in the history of the English language and on English sound-structure as well as on verse and verse-form, at the University of Manchester (1985-2003) before deciding to spend more time on writing. From 2003-2013 he worked part-time at various universities in the Netherlands (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam; Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) while working on a number of different books for, among others, Carcanet, Cambridge University Press and The Medlar Press. His "Selected Poems" appeared from Carcanet in 2012, when he also gave the John Rylands Poetry Reading in Manchester with Michael Schmidt. Chris retains strong links with Manchester and with Carcanet: he remains chairman and co-director of the Modern Literary Archives programme at the John Rylands University Library. In 2013 Chris and his wife relocate to Colchester and the University of Essex, where Chris has accepted a part-time position in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies and where Monika will become a Professor of Applied Linguistics in the department of the same name. Chris's most recent prose work is a book on Irish sea-trout fishing ("Medlar", to appear, 2013). He is also undertaking a series of new poems about the Serengeti and its wildlife, is beginning a new, metrical translation of Beowulf and is busy writing a new set of essays which will in turn comprise "From the Last Sane Places on Earth", a book about travel, dislocation and writing (forthcoming from Carcanet).

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