Maurice Scully: Humming

Published October 2009

Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610514

Humming is Maurice Scully's first full-length book of new work since the Things That Happen project (1981–2006). Dedicated to the poet's late brother, it places human life in the larger frame of history and pre-history, of a world in drifts of pollen, and other life possibilities over large stretches of time in which the poetry can score its pollen-like trace knowing

           "how to wait
                              what to expect"

"The poet is not pushed forward as a surrogate hero, an ideal fictionalised presence in whose identity we lose ourselves: he is, always, just (just!) a person making. We are offered a poetry of witness, not of personality and career-accomplishment. We find ourselves watching what's happening, as it happens, with little concern for personal achievement. What can be constructed upon an event is not the point: the point is, very differently, what seeming non-events provide … The poems don't promote a line of their own so much as transform the space around them."
—JCC Mays on the launch of Doing the Same in English (2008)

Download a sampler PDF of work from this book.

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