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 (1997) and Sound Intentions: The Workings of Rhyme in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (2012), and has edited Louis MacNeice's Collected Poems (2007) and most recently three volumes of the Longman Poems of W.B. Yeats. He is Emeritus Professor of British and Irish Poetry in Oxford University, and an Emeritus Student of Christ Church, Oxford.
Author photo: Michal Mecner
'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
'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
'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
Awards won by Peter McDonald
Short-listed, 2017 London Hellenic Prize (The Homeric Hymns)
