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Serengeti SongsChris McCully
Categories: 21st Century, African
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Paperback (80 pages) (Pub. Mar 2016) 9781784102524 Out of Stock eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE! (Pub. Mar 2016) 9781784102531 £10.39 £9.35 To use the EPUB version, you will need to have Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) installed on your device. You can find out more at https://www.adobe.com/uk/solutions/ebook/digital-editions.html. Please do not purchase this version if you do not have and are not prepared to install, Adobe Digital Editions.
These are the plains.
The distance is made from ash and rains: jacinth, amber and beryl blew apart, time lay on the rubble of burning lakes and where heat walked up the edge of slopes roots probed cracks in the crust ...
In Serengeti Songs Chris McCully plays poet-guide on a safari through East Africa’s abundant wild landscape. Dik-dik, topi, elephant and impala roam these pages, darting between the acacia’s ‘burnt star-dome’ and the baobab’s myth-rich shade. The poems conjure a Serengeti both glorious and savage, its light ‘stained with blood’, its marshlands steeped in ‘murderous silence’. But McCully’s writing is formally playful and diverse, the collection a safari in itself; accompanying photographs and taxonomic endnotes riff on the guidebook form. The poems also play with gazes: they inspect not only wildlife but also the human need to inspect. Wealthy interlopers demand to see the lions ‘do what they do on TV’, yet ‘know nothing of how the river-pool devours starlight’. The collection’s post-colonial alertness, however, does not compromise the core of wonder hinted at by its title: McCully’s songs are awe-struck celebrations of a unique and delicate landscape. They are, too, protest songs, swansongs: they bear witness, even at their most rhapsodic, to the threat of extinction resulting from human zeal. ‘How many dawns have the great herds run the rim of the world?’ he asks. These poems engage with the Serengeti’s complex symbolism, an emblem both of bounty and scarcity, wonder and loss.
'McCully gets the life of words, their swing and weight, resonance and cadence. The poems spark with great lines and phrases...'
Literary Review 'This is a singular collection from a singular voice in English poetry, and I highly commend it.' Phillip Quinlan, Angle Praise for Chris McCully 'His verse is crisp and propulsive... At its best, McCully's translation is clear and readable, hitting the beats of Old English metre, and offering punchy phrases' Caroline Batten and Charles Tolkien-Gillet, Translation and Literature 'This is a commendable and exhilarating book, McCully admirably bringing to life the world of honour, weirdness and creatures beyond our ken.' Anthony Clay, Chase |
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