Collected Poems

Description

In the five volumes of poetry he has published since 1989, Peter McDonald explores an intimately known territory that becomes strange: pulled out of shape by history, made unfamiliar by distance, made new by the attentive imagination. McDonald's "Collected Poems" is a sustained meditation on place and belonging, loss and love. The classical world is a haunting presence; the landscape of McDonald's poems resonates with past voices, with memories and acts of remembrance. The assured and scrupulous craft that creates the telling detail, the unsettling depth, has made him one of the most important Northern Irish writers of his generation.

PETER MCDONALD was born in Belfast in 1962, and was educated at Methodist College, Belfast, and University College, Oxford. After winning the Newdigate Prize and an Eric Gregory Award, he published his first book of poems in 1989. His critical and editorial work includes Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (1997), Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill (2002), The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice (2007), and Sound Intentions: The Workings of Rhyme in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (2012). He is the editor of W.B. Yeats' Complete Poems for Longman. For the last thirty years Peter McDonald has divided his time between Northern Ireland and England, where he works as a university lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford. He has two children, and lives in Oxfordshire.

"McDonald is a writer of great range as well as subtlety." Fiona Sampson, "Irish Times""