The House of Clay is Peter McDonald's fourth book of poems, containing lyrics which combine intense resonance of narrative and imagery with powerful formal concentration. Autobiographical material, founded on a childhood in Belfast during the troubled 1970s, is developed and transformed by the book's other strands: poems on the contemporary Middle East, and poems drawing on Greek and Latin sources (including translations of Pindar and Virgil) build together into a moving and complex meditation on personal and historical loss.

McDonald is one of the most widely-known (and most controversial) critics of modern British and Irish poetry; his poetry builds into itself the critical intelligence and anger of that context, along with the visionary intensity of an original, and impassioned imagination. The House of Clay creates a new and uncompromising kind of Irish poetry, in which the ancient and the modern, the pagan and the Northern Irish Protestant, find a piercingly clear register.

Contents

San Domenico 9
The hand 11
As seen 13
Cetacea 15
Clearout 17
The gnat 19
Literal 21
War diary 22
The moth 23
The other world 24
Strongman 25
Spoils 27
The overcoat 28
A schoolboy 30
Windows 31
Three rivers 32
The pattern 35
Syrian 37
The fob-watch 38
Against the fear of death 40
Mar Sarkis 41
In heaven 42
Inventory 44
The anniversary 45
Forecast 46
Flex 47
The walk 48
Quis separabit 49
Late morning 50
The pieces 51
The street called Straight 56
Arithmetic 57
Vigilantes 58
Ode 59
44A 60
The bees 62

Coda 66

Notes 69