Carcanet Press - Pastorals

Description
Author
Awards
Reviews

Peter McDonald invokes and explores the pastoral imagination, in love-poems and poems about grief, poems concerning remote history and the more recent past, and poems which find new shapes for our difficult, sometimes contradictory, relations to place and environment. Some longer pieces bring together these concerns: 'The Victory Weekend' sets the London VE-Day anniversary celebrations in 1995 against an adolescence in Belfast, while 'Eclogue' (an updating of Virgil) brings to post-Peace Process Belfast a debate between the exile and the stay-at-home.

McDonald's lyric variety and control (from sharp rhyming couplets to seventeenth-century heroic stanzas, from sonnets and unrhymed forms to Spenserian stanzas) make for memorable, sometimes haunted and unsettling, poetry.

Pastorals is Peter McDonald's first book for eight years, and confirms him as being among Ireland's most accomplished lyric poets.

Peter McDonald was born in Belfast in 1962. His first book of poetry, Biting the Wax, was published in 1989, and since then seven volumes of his verse have appeared, including his Collected Poems (2012). He has written four books of literary criticism, including Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland ... read more

Awards won by Peter McDonald Short-listed, 2017 London Hellenic Prize (The Homeric Hymns)

'Peter McDonald's unsettling imagination occupies a middle distance between domesticity and wilderness - what he calls 'the melancholy distance'. His fine elegies and love poems have in common a cool intonation and an argumentative persistence: the overlap is a telling one. McDonald's disenchanted vision makes the moments of intimacy and tenderness, when they come, all the more affecting. In addition, his profound literary intelligence thrives on metrical and stanzaic challenge, and ranges with relish from gnomic brevity to sustained meditation, narrative and memoir. These poems, which with their gently syncopated lines may seem understated, register the uneasiness and the excitement of 'the buzzing world': they are, in the poet's own words, 'back roads to everywhere'.
Michael Longley Praise for Peter McDonald 'Wise, acerbic, tuneful yet conversational... Ranging from oblique lyrics to blank verse so subtle it strikes the ear first as speech... a rich and various life shapes these richly various poems.'
Rosanna Warren, Ploughshares 'This is visual, visionary poetry, burning with the light of its own meaning, determined to see what is really there.'
Andrew McCulloch, Times Literary Supplement 'Some personalities have their day in politics and in poetry; but if we listen as attentively as these poems ask us to, McDonald's words should outlast any amplified roars.'
Fran Brearton, The Guardian 'McDonald is often impressively adept at using varied metres for cadence, musicality, tension. He resists the over-dramatic, but is a poet of fierce feeling - moved and often moving.'
TLS 'Hugely impressive... not just rich but endlessly varied and subtle... marvellous.'
David Wheatley, Irish Times 'Peter McDonald's unsettling imagination occupies a middle distance between domesticity and wilderness... [his] disenchanted vision makes the moments of intimacy and tenderness, when they come, all the more affecting.'
Michael Longley, CBE 'McDonald's work 'is entirely in keeping with Milton's enjoinder that poetry be "simple, sensuous and passionate". His musicality is not just rich but endlessly varied and subtle. [...] It embodies the values of accuracy, conscience, and restraint but with no skimping of intensity or ferocity.'
David Wheatley, Irish Times

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Pastorals Peter McDonald Categories: 21st Century, Irish Imprint: Carcanet Poetry Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Paperback (96 pages) (Pub. Sep 2004) 9781857547528 Out of Stock Description Author Awards Reviews Peter McDonald invokes and explores the pastoral imagination, in love-poems and poems about grief, poems concerning remote history and the more recent past, and poems which find new shapes for our difficult, sometimes contradictory, relations to place and environment. Some longer pieces bring together these concerns: 'The Victory Weekend' sets the London VE-Day anniversary celebrations in 1995 against an adolescence in Belfast, while 'Eclogue' (an updating of Virgil) brings to post-Peace Process Belfast a debate between the exile and the stay-at-home. McDonald's lyric variety and control (from sharp rhyming couplets to seventeenth-century heroic stanzas, from sonnets and unrhymed forms to Spenserian stanzas) make for memorable, sometimes haunted and unsettling, poetry. Pastorals is Peter McDonald's first book for eight years, and confirms him as being among Ireland's most accomplished lyric poets. Peter McDonald was born in Belfast in 1962. His first book of poetry, Biting the Wax, was published in 1989, and since then seven volumes of his verse have appeared, including his Collected Poems (2012). He has written four books of literary criticism, including Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland ... read more Awards won by Peter McDonald Short-listed, 2017 London Hellenic Prize (The Homeric Hymns) 'Peter McDonald's unsettling imagination occupies a middle distance between domesticity and wilderness - what he calls 'the melancholy distance'. His fine elegies and love poems have in common a cool intonation and an argumentative persistence: the overlap is a telling one. McDonald's disenchanted vision makes the moments of intimacy and tenderness, when they come, all the more affecting. In addition, his profound literary intelligence thrives on metrical and stanzaic challenge, and ranges with relish from gnomic brevity to sustained meditation, narrative and memoir. These poems, which with their gently syncopated lines may seem understated, register the uneasiness and the excitement of 'the buzzing world': they are, in the poet's own words, 'back roads to everywhere'. Michael Longley Praise for Peter McDonald 'Wise, acerbic, tuneful yet conversational... Ranging from oblique lyrics to blank verse so subtle it strikes the ear first as speech... a rich and various life shapes these richly various poems.' Rosanna Warren, Ploughshares 'This is visual, visionary poetry, burning with the light of its own meaning, determined to see what is really there.' Andrew McCulloch, Times Literary Supplement 'Some personalities have their day in politics and in poetry; but if we listen as attentively as these poems ask us to, McDonald's words should outlast any amplified roars.' Fran Brearton, The Guardian 'McDonald is often impressively adept at using varied metres for cadence, musicality, tension. He resists the over-dramatic, but is a poet of fierce feeling - moved and often moving.' TLS 'Hugely impressive... not just rich but endlessly varied and subtle... marvellous.' David Wheatley, Irish Times 'Peter McDonald's unsettling imagination occupies a middle distance between domesticity and wilderness... [his] disenchanted vision makes the moments of intimacy and tenderness, when they come, all the more affecting.' Michael Longley, CBE 'McDonald's work 'is entirely in keeping with Milton's enjoinder that poetry be "simple, sensuous and passionate". His musicality is not just rich but endlessly varied and subtle. [...] It embodies the values of accuracy, conscience, and restraint but with no skimping of intensity or ferocity.' David Wheatley, Irish Times	Share this... Quick Links Carcanet Poetry Carcanet Classics Carcanet Fiction Carcanet Film Lives and Letters PN Review Video Carcanet Celebrates 50 Years! The Carcanet Blog PN Review 278: Set 5: Mondo de Sunbrilo Translated by John Gallas read more Apple Thieves: Beverley Bie Brahic read more PN Review Creative Writing Prize: 'If Only Id Known Back Then' by Jack Morris read more Scattered Snows, to the North: Carl Phillips read more Gabriel Josipovici: Partita and A Winter in Zrau read more Why Are You Shouting?: James Womack read more
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