There is much to admire in Torchlight, Peter McDonald's fifth collection, in which he displays a range reminiscent of his fellow Ulsterman, Louis Mac Neice, whose work has been the considerable object of his scholarly attentions. In particular, he plays upon all the registers of memory- delights, regret, surprise, recognition, with beguiling deftness and a wonderful ability to pick out telling details.
Sometimes such details can be the key to a whole generation- a glass of lemon barley water ('I watch the turns and twists, like dust-/motes, of all the sunner-on barley-/ flecks suspended in the water'), singles records and 'the Dansette with its open lid', Green Shield stamps, or the black Ford Prefect which features at the start of 'The Battery Bay', the first of twelve unrhymed sonnets which make up 'Childhood Memories'. But such evocations are in the serice of a question much more intersting than nostalgia, the one made explicity in 'Oxford Poetry' (in memory of Mick Imlah, with its nicely playful dedication i.i.M.I): 'the information, accurate and mad,/of a spent lifetime, what does it come to? Considering this from a variety of angles, McDonald often deploys elements of the natural world, notably the sea, clouds and light: they feature meorably in the book's middle section, which includes an excellent trio of matching, formally identical poems (each of seven rhymed quatrains) having in common the context of the sea and a protagonist seein in 'The Different' as 'alone with all his plans and his misfortunes/ distinct in the light and intranslatable'. Dominating this section is McDonald's translation of the sixth century BC Homoeric 'Hymn to Demeter'- well over five hundred lines, in a version which, as a note tells us, attempts to be as faithul as possible to the Greek text, while making 'some cuts and compressions'. The results is a pacy narrative that relates convincingly and with verve the story of the abduction of Persephone by her uncle Hades, ruler of the underworld, and her mother Demeter's attempts to rescue her.
The poems in the book's final section are also to do wit hthe hauntings of the past- with guilt, remorse and responsibility, often in the context of the poet's ulster homeland, while in 'Least', a noise outside is a trigger for the offsetting long perspective in which 'I simply don't amtter,/not now, and not later,/all perfectly clear...'
It's Ulster, too, that informs many of the poems in 'Childhood Memories', while others are more purely instances of sensory recall. Best of all, these poems enact the process of memory, one layer concealed inside another, so thatr the memory of a bed-ridder great uncle becomes also the great-uncle's recall of the first world war; in another poem, an elctric torch switched on during a power cut to illuminate a child's game with soldiers, becomes in the context of the dim room 'a reflection of a reflection', where 'shadows regrouped and shifted,as I crept to war/ with the eye of a burning torch burning in my eye'. And the final poem 'The Cheetach', pleasingly offers, in the image of a helium balloon that a child lets go of, the possibilty of release from the past, the thought that

what I held, or was holding to,
could take itself up and away,
and all there was for me to do
was let it go.