Serengeti Songs

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.

Chris McCully was born in Bradford, Yorkshire in 1958. Between 1985 and 2003 he worked as a full-time academic, specialising in the history of the English language, English sound-structure, and verse-form at the University of Manchester. From 2003 to 2013 he worked part-time at universities in the Netherlands (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam; Rijksuniversiteit, Groningen) while researching and writing a number of books. His Selected Poems appeared from Carcanet in 2012. McCully is chairman and co-director of the Modern Literary Archives programme at the John Rylands University Library, Manchester. In 2013 he relocated with his wife to Colchester and the University of Essex, where he works in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies.