Chris McCully has translated the Anglo-Saxon Riddles. Now he takes on the greatest Old English epic, devising a highly expressive prosody, and providing a full introduction and rich up-to-date annotation.

The formation of the -Serengeti in Africa, the emergence of homo sapiens, the amazing wildlife, patterns of migration and predation are the themes of the fiercely engaged poems and photographs in this unusual book, which brings to life Tanzania and K...

Chris McCully's "Selected Poems" includes work from 1993 to 2009, a representative selection which reveals his precise craft of language and poetic form. The book opens with the prose-poem "Dust" from his 2009 collection "Polder", a meditation on ext...

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 alcoho...

Chris McCully brings Old English poetry to life with exhilarating immediacy. Here is the earliest surviving English poem, "Caedmon's Hymn", as well as one of the last poems to be written in the classical Old English alliterative style; some of the gr...

"The Country of Perhaps" is a work in two parts. Part I, a collection of lyric poems, explores the nature and the power of human illusion, and shows how that power is generated not from 'cultural forces' but from the demands of individual choice in t...

When Chris McCully's first book of poems, "Time Signatures" (Carcanet, 1993), appeared, the "Observer" described the poet as "a keen fly-fisher, a translator of Old English poetry and an expert prosodist; and these skills have miraculously combined s...

"Time Signatures" is Chris McCully's first book of poems. It reflects his fascination – as student, scholar and theorist with the procedures of writing verse, especially with rhythmical and metrical structures. The subject-matter here is drawn from t...