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The Gifts of Fortune
The poems in The Gifts of Fortune, Peter McDonald's seventh book of poems, cover a spectrum of personal history. They go to Belfast, Oxford, and further afield; in time they visit the poet's pasts, his now, his possible futures. Autobiographical detail abounds: McDonald's experiences (as a workingclass boy in Belfast, who dreams of leaving, and a middleaged Oxford don, who dreams of going back) are filtered through a deep instinct for poetic tradition. At the heart of the book are two sequences: one, 'Mud', in which family, professional, and literary histories are combined in strictly formal, but personally unguarded, reflections on poetry, class, and privilege; and another, 'Blindness', where a series of tenline units test poetic form to (and beyond) breaking-point, in a meditation on family and suffering, disappointment and hope. Other poems return to themes of wealth and poverty, love and loss, and the alienation and puzzlement of age. Throughout the book, form is ghosted by the formless, hovering just beyond the frame; and Fortune vies with Fate, quite another force.
Louis MacNeice
Since his death in 1963, Louis MacNeice's critical standing has risen steadily. This new study addresses the contexts of his writing that are of greatest relevance to his place in modern poetry: his problematic relation to Ireland and his place in the largely English "thirties generation" with which he is often identified. The influence of these aspects on MacNeice's poetic development is studied in detail, addressing his relation to Yeats and Modernism and his conception of parable as a key imaginative response to these influences. Included also is the first study of the poet's revealing and little-known early writings. Arguing that MacNeice is a central figure in modern Irish and British poetry, this work sheds new light on the poems.
The House of Clay
Publisher description
Collected Poems
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.
Animal Nutrition
This fifth edition now includes: modifiers of digestion and metabolism, an up-to-date summary of feed analysis, relevant emphasis on human nutrition and increased emphasis on tropical components.
Pastorals
The first collection of poems in eight years from one of Ireland's most accomplished lyric poets invokes and explores the pastoral imagination in poems about grief, love's remote history, and a more recent past. In poems that, in his words, are written from a "melancholy distance," McDonald finds new shapes that reflect the difficult, contradictory relations of people to place and environment.
Biting the Wax
'Biting the Wax is a quiet but convincing book, a strong first collection. Its diction is plain and its tone objective; yet nothing in Peter McDonald's world is predictable ('everything is possible and probable'). The very composure of the poems - their surface calm, their ostentatious style - sharpens the ominous and menacing atmosphere which pervades so many of them. Sunday in an English village on the day of Enniskillen, wartime outrages, the thoughts of Count Dracula - his imaginative, speculative, narrative compass is wide. The angle of vision is often beguilingly oblique, although riveting eye-to-eye contact is established in the longest poem, "Silent Night". Peter McDonald is skilful enough to render life in all its irony and absurdity without needing to raise his voice, strain for effect or resort to gimmickry. He trusts the language and, in the course of this absorbing debut. It generously replays that trust.' - Dennis O'Driscoll
Oxford Dictionary of Medical Quotations
The Oxford Book of Medical Quotations presents a wonderfully entertaining and eclectic range of quotations covering all aspects of medicine through the ages. It couples profound statements from famous scientists with witty one-liners from the likes of Woody Allen and Spike Milligan. Packed with hundreds of quotations, it is a book that anyone in the medical profession, or with an interest in health, will find an invaluable source of reference hand considerable entertainment.
Torchlight
Torchlight explores the haunting persistence of memories, and the acts of remembrance which preserve and shape them. In his fifth collection, the Northern Irish poet Peter McDonald ranges across a wide poetic landscape, from Belfast in the troubled 1970s to contemporary England, from personal recollection to a fragment of Sappho's memory of her youth, eloquent across millennia; from ancient myth to rock music. At the centre of Torchlight is a major new translation of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, a Greek text which, in McDonald's hands, resonates with the concerns and discoveries of the book's shorter poems, and brings the mystery cult of Eleusis into an unnerving conjunction with the losses, recoveries and revelations elsewhere in the collection. McDonald's powerful lyric poetry is both complex and memorable, light and vigorous. His is an original and distinctive voice in Irish poetry.
Serious Poetry
Do we want to read poetry, or just like having a few poets to talk about?The history of poetry in twentieth-century Britain and Ireland is one which ends with the assimilation of successful poets into a media culture; it is also, however, another history, one of form and authority, in which certain poets found modes and pitches of resistance to the seeminginevitabilities of their times. In this history, it is the authority of poetry (and not the media-processed poet) which is at stake in the integrity of poetic form.Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill offers a controversial reading of twentieth-century British and Irish poetry centred on six figures, all of whom are critics as well as poets: W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. Yeats'scentrality to twentieth-century poetry - and the problem many poets and critics had, or still have, with that centrality - is a major focus of the book. Serious Poetry argues that it is in the strengths, possibilities, perplexities, and certainties of the poetic form that poetry's authority in adistrustful cultural climate remains most seriously alive.
