The second-hand bookseller from whom I
purchased my copy of Chris McCully’s Selected
Poems had affixed a sticker to the cover saying it had been discounted to
£1 because it was ‘curvy’. As well as for its slightly warped appearance,
‘curvy’ might stand as an appropriate adjective for the book’s contents too, in
so far as the poems deviate in interesting ways from the flat and predictable
surfaces of much current verse, in particular offering a more varied and
rounded sense of formal accomplishment than usually encountered. If his deliberate, carefully-honed style seems
– in a positive way - ‘out of key with its time’, this is because McCully benches
his work in an intimate and complex engagement with the whole tradition of English poetry,
rather than drawing only upon other contemporaries or near-contemporaries.
Trained in
linguistics and more latterly an academic specialising in prosody and Old
English, McCully often resembles Modernist luminaries like Pound and Bunting in
forging innovative permutations out of older materials, adopting a ‘reculer pour mieux sauter’ approach to
remould universal themes and tropes: mutability, seasonal change, love turned
bitter, separation, all met with a wry Horatian stoicism. (Knowing that McCully
has published a memoir about his struggle with alcoholism – Goodbye Mr Wonderful (2004) - makes it
all the more admirable that he never lapses into confessional self-disclosure.)
McCully’s astute
ear, however, is attracted more to metre and rhyme than to freer forms, and
everywhere throughout the selection the major forebears cited in his Preface –
Hardy, Yeats, Graves and Auden- are apparent (one might perhaps add another
masterful verse-technician, Louis MacNiece). In fact the influence of the early, ‘English
Auden’ is perhaps the dominant one on McCully’s first volume Time Signatures (1993) - the adapting of Anglo-Saxon models to create
dense phonetic textures and a sense of haunting estrangement can be heard in
the Audenesque ‘Towards the unknown
region’:
‘Wry
light on slate,
leaving the darkening trees...
It is
the stranger wanting peace
at
the watershed knows peace recedes
beyond each stride’
Where McCully also
follows Auden is in returning lyric to its original source in song-based forms
such as the ballad and villanelle, with frequent use of refrains, syntactical
repetition and other acoustic devices that appeal to what Eliot called the
“auditory imagination” as much as to the intellect. Again, McCully’s insistence
on the poem as highly-crafted verbal artefact sets him apart from less
scrupulous contemporaries: short pieces such as ‘Pastoral’ and ‘Demeter’ have
all the plaintive grace and fluency of Elizabethan lyrics.
As with Auden,
however, one wonders if McCully’s impressive technical facility has
occasionally lead him in the direction of the merely facile: by the time we
reach ‘Mass’ from The Country of Perhaps(2002),
the too-obviously Auden-borrowed rhyme-scheme coupled with a reaching towards
faith quite as unconvincing as the older poet’s provokes bathos rather than
uplift:
‘Throw away the calendar,
The
critical key.
Cancel the cleverness
That
calls you free...
Look back at history
As
it pours into space
And
into the mirror
Of
your disgrace.’
Some of the most
successful pieces in the book, on the other hand, are the translations from Old
English texts (2008), where McCully’s handling of the rugged, two-ply
alliterative line seems to capture the strident thud and anfractuous intensity
of the original poems with unfaltering tact. To compare McCully’s version of
‘The Seafarer’ with Pound’s is instructive: despite the many virtues of Pound’s
famous (or infamous) adaptation, it seems rather overdone and in fact
romanticised when compared with McCully’s starker, more pared-down and
therefore more tangibly human Seafarer-voice. It also highlights how much
editing Pound did both of the poem’s original length – not that McCully’s
rendering ever seems overlong – and also of the strong Christian elements within
the poem, such as the invocation and ‘Amen’ at the end: surely, without these,
the whole moral context for the Seafarer’s laments on worldliness is lost.
McCully’s structuring of this Selected Poems is intriguing. At the
forefront of the book he places a five-page prose-poem called ‘Dust’, which is
actually from the last volume represented, Polder
(2009): its darkly spiralling cadences, somewhere between the King James Bible
and a Beckett monologue, are bleaker than anything that comes after. This seems
to be thematically intentional, whereby (as McCully writes in his Preface) “the
poems which succeed the piece may be read as fragments of consolation, of
partial vision, of a tempered, amended voice.” Certainly the trajectory of the
book plots a development from more troubled, rueful, at times satirical work
through to the calmer, more consoling voice of Polder, written after the poet’s relocation to the Netherlands. Two
groups of poems in this volume count as among the most achieved and effective
in the book: a cycle of ekphrastic studies based on paintings in the
Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and another of well-measured imitations of Horatian
odes addressed to McCully’s own Torquatus-figure. They form a fitting
culmination to this excellent, far-reaching selection.
(First published in The BowWowShop 2012)
