The Frost Fairs

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 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 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 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

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.

Winner of the 2012 Polari Prize

A Book of the Year for The Independent and The Poetry School

Holiday Read in The Observer

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.