Country of Perhaps
"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 the face of implacable circumstance. Thus Icarus, choosing to fly but finally, glad of falling. Thus the fishermen of Santa Monica Pier, retreating into the benevolent defeat of their illusions: "Real life's defeated them across the word". Part II is composed by Mass, a longer "poem for voices" (the tautology implies that the piece should ideally be read aloud). Based around, and analysing, the various components of the religious Mass, and centred in the meaning of the Eucharist, Mass analyses the Christian guarantee of salvation, and concludes that it, too, is a myth, another necessary invention about truth. One spokesman for this conclusion is Judas Iscariot, who delivers the Homily in terms that may be familiar to those versed in so-called "cultural theory". Another spokesman is the beloved disciple, John, whose voice encompasses an older, wearier and more generous wisdom. Mass is both satire and politics, analysis and elegy. It is McCully's most ambitious achievement to date.
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).
