A Change of Season

In a TLS review of Reading Geographies, Dick Davis said that Cullup's poems had a "curmudgeonly, undeceived, deliberate lack of resonance" about them. To C. H. Sisson, they were "the actual off-scourings of life, which is what I look for".

Michael Cullup's poetry is steeped in the values of the English lyric. Clear, concise and profoundly concerned with the commonality of experience, the poems of A Change of Season draw from the verse tradition of Hardy, Graves, Larkin and C.H. Sisson. At the centre of these poems is a sensibility at ease with being outside fashionable nostrums and manufactured public urgency. Cullup is a poet who embodies Graves' dictum: "Every poet is a minority of one".

A Change of Season is Cullup's first major collection for over a decade and sees the poet at his most assured. Never shying from the great themes - love, loss, mortality - Cullup remains true to a personal vision which haunts and disturbs.

About the author:

Michael Cullup comes from Abbotsley, Huntingdonshire. He went to the village school there, then won a scholarship to Kimbolton School in the same county. After National Service in the Royal Navy, he went on to University College, London, and Birbeck College. He taught English in schools and colleges before specialising in the teaching of English to overseas students, having gained a postgraduate qualification at Leeds University. He worked in Kenya, Saudi Arabia, and Thailand, before joining the Bell Educational Trust in Norwich. He has lived in Norfolk since 1977, and retired from teaching in 1993 to become a full-time writer.

98  pages

ISBN: 978-1-906075-38-5