Description
Book Synopsis"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.
Trade Review'McDonald is a fine poet and Pastorals a varied, warm-hearted collection - John Greening, The London Magazine (on McDonald's previous collection).
Table of ContentsContents 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
