Search results for ""Author Chris McCully""

Alcohol thought Chris McCully was Mr. Wonderful. When Chris was drinking, he sometimes thought so too - Mr. Generous, Mr. Witty and Charming, Mr. Champagne. But there are other labels - 'chronic alcoholic' (all over the medical notes); 'high risk offender' (in the court record). Goodbye, Mr. Wonderful gives a detailed account of the early stages of recovery from alcoholism. From his admittance into hospital to his life as a writer in the Netherlands, McCully offers a detailed and often analytical reflection on what it feels like to be a recovering alcoholic. There is no cure for alcoholism, but there is daily management, and there is hope. This is a book for anyone who wishes to understand, or wishes that someone else could understand, the process of healing from addiction.

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Any translation is a reading. Chris McCully reads Beowulf as an epic written in English using all the complex metrical conventions of its time, as well as distinctive epic tropes including sea-crossings, oracular pronouncements and encounters with the monstrous. This version renders the original in readable contemporary English but also keeps as close as it can to the older, alliterative metrical system, so that readers may experience something of the textures and formal properties of the original. An `Afterword’ explains the translator’s formal choices and explores the nature of this epic, with its emphasis on tribe, location and mortality. `McCully captures the special magic and power of the Beowulf poet’s word-pile and life-thoughts.’ (Martin Duffell, Fellow of Queen Mary, University of London)

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Chris McCully's Selected Poems includes work from 1993 to 2009, a representative selection which reveals his engagement with the precise crafts of language and poetic form. The book opens with the prose-poem 'Dust' from his 2009 collection Polder, a meditation on extinction: 'dust again the voices of the pages and the voices of the lovers'. Other voices follow, conversations in which civility, memories of friendship, art and literature respond to the desolation of dust, asserting what imagination can create from it. In translations from Old English, sonnets, villanelles and ballads, McCully's supple, sparing verse celebrates the fragile place in which we live, 'between space and space - / and both are dark'.

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Draws on the author's own recovery from alcoholism, his move to the Dutch landscape and the work of famous artists such as Vermeer and Rembrandt in dialogues that range from the quizzical to the confrontational.

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