John McCullough

Biographical note:  John McCullough was born in Watford in 1978. His poetry has appeared in publications including Poetry London, The Rialto, The Guardian, Magma and London Magazine. He teaches literature and creative writing at the Open University and the University of Sussex and has a Ph.d from Sussex on rhetoric and friendship in English Renaissance writing. He lives in Brighton.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844713981
ISBN:  9781844713981
Author:  John McCullough
Title:  The Frost Fairs
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DCF
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  27-Apr-11
Extent:  80pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  6 mm
Weight:  120 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  The Frost Fairs is a moving book with a global and historical reach, dealing with love in many forms from modern transatlantic relationships to hidden gay lives from the past. Formally deft yet deeply poignant, these poems use language filled with imagination and musicality in their exploration of the possibilities of the human heart.

Main description:  The Frost Fairs is a compassionate book with a global and historical scope, tackling science and city life from a range of surreal yet poignant angles. It explores love in many forms, from modern transatlantic relationships to hidden gay and cross-gendered lives from the past. The pieces travel from ancient Alexandria to twenty-first century bars and council estates, behind everything the vastness of the sea and sky. The array of voices here is striking: taxi drivers report their most outlandish fares and hermaphrodite statues flirt with observers; abandoned lovers watch frost fairs melting on the Thames and drag queens revel in the freedoms afforded by the Blitz.

Formally deft and carefully crafted, this diverse range of poems uses language that is always musical and alive. Surprise and the uncanny are cherished as ways of returning to us the strange leaps and enduring power of our deepest yearnings. In this collection, longing and losing condition all we see and hear, making the impossible suddenly plausible. Whether exploring Brighton seascapes or questions of empire, there is always in McCullough’s writing an openness to seeing the world from an alternative point of view. At once bold and haunting, The Frost Fairs opens the door to a new country in the reader’s imagination in its exploration of the possibilities of the human heart.

Table of contents:
Contents
Sleeping Hermaphrodite
Talacre
Night Writing
Reading Frank O’Hara on the Brighton Express
The Light of ???Venus
Masterclass
Small, Vertical Pleasures
On Galileo’s Birthday
Sneakers
Known Light
The Last Hangman
The Long Mile
Islands
The Floating World
The Other Side of ??Winter
The Dictionary Man
Georgie, Belladonna, Sid
Angels Over Hatfield
The Empress of ??Mud
The Crystal Palace
Circumference
Miss Fothergill Observes a Snail
Foucault’s Spoons
Cold Fusion
Ghost
The Cure
Portrait of the Young Poet as a Wagtail
The Moon of Myths
Severance
Seascape
The Disappearance of St Anthony’s Church
Tropospheric
Dragons
The Amazing Tintin
Cherry Tops
The Loft Fire
Crepuscular
Motile

View excerpt as PDF:

Click here to view a sample ( KB)

Excerpt from book:  

The Crystal Palace

In Hyde Park, leeches are waiting.
Their glass prisons are linked
to a bell by fine chains. It rings

when they become frenzied by shifts
in the air that signify unfurling tempests.
You would have relished such enterprise,

this Exhibition dreamt up by the Prince —
halls of crystal where any world is feasible.
I picture your long fingers caressing

the rims of improbable fountains,
grasping mangos from Assam, the sides
of a bed that turns into a life-raft.

But you are oceans away, a sunburnt jailer
flanked by swamps and blood-sucking convicts.
And I am an envelope-making machine.

I slide through grinning crowds for sights
to furnish next week’s letter, mark the days
between replies. A knife with eighty blades,

I shall write, might be practical for pioneers.
What arms the colonist like imagination?
By a wall are models of the human eye

cross-sectioned, a doctor pointing
to cornea, pupil, nerve to demonstrate
how light can flood a structure, then leave.

Unpublished endorsement:  In this immensely enjoyable collection there is an immediacy and tenderness that is outstanding. These vivid moving poems have such a sharp eye for those telling daily details, the particulars. All of this, plus their humour, creates poems that are so solidly tangible and believable. The title The Frost Fairs tells it all. The vulnerability and changeableness that threads our lives, the shifting ice below our feet.

Lee Harwood

Unpublished endorsement:  John McCullough's poems are never far from wonderful. He shows a lovely mixture of ease and energy, so that there's a feeling of improvisation even in closed forms. Unpredictable, tender, resourceful – why shouldn't Wallace Stevens hold hands with Tintin?

Adam Mars-Jones

Unpublished endorsement:  John McCullough is a poet for whom language is a flexible gift. He can be formal and controlled, colloquial and intimate, sensuous and saucy. He enjoys risk-taking in his work, forging unusual juxtapositions of images and ideas, and it’s this playfulness and humour which makes his work, like a stiff sea breeze suddenly hitting you in the face, so refreshing and invigorating.

Catherine Smith

Unpublished endorsement:  I’ve been reading John McCullough’s poems for several years and never saw him as “promising,” rather, as a verbal magician who had already performed, with a sureness and brio anyone might envy. The startling range of subjects can be partly accounted for by his ability to enter the imaginations of personae from odd walks of life or curious moments in history. He is even able to work out what Michel Foucault’s spoons might have thought about their owner! In poem after poem one senses the encroachment of an exalted vision held at bay by this poet’s commitment to conversational tone and offhand irony. I don’t want to round up the usual superlatives, but I do urge you to read this landmark first volume.

Alfred Corn