Miles up I don't know where I am or care.
Pressure, fracture deliver me to air.
Without your hard completion nothing's whole.
I dreamed your body back across the Pole.


`Flight'
            

When Chris McCully's first book of poems, Time Signatures (Carcanet, 1993), appeared, the Observer described the poet as `a keen fly-fisher, a translator of Old English poetry and an expert prosodist; and these skills have miraculously combined so that almost every poem alights on the surface of the reader's mind with absolute integrity, judgment, and profound allure'. McCully was, it added, `a major poet in the making'. In Not only I, a collection of love poems, he begins to fulfil that promise. His international reputation as a linguist, philologist, writer and theorist informs the collection, from the choice of inevitable structures to the explored cultural and individual difficulties of desire and loss. In this generous-and often wry-book, a poetic talent comes to maturity and finds its achieved voice.