Chris McCully's Selected Poems includes work from 1993 to 2009, a representative selection which reveals his precise craft 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 can be created out of it. In translations from Old English, sonnets, villanelles and ballads, McCully's supple, sparing verse celebrates the fragile areas in which we live, between space and space – / and both are dark'.
