They would bury ashes or bodies in the evening,
then say whatever was right to say, looking
out into a bruised and sun-inflamed west
to think of the dead, and take leave of them.
There would be noise from here and there – people,
animals, carts, invisible cicadas –
and the one road to town would darken. When
everyone had gone back, and night came,
the spirit would loiter unseen by its grave,
alone and afraid to go far, anxious
for dawn, and departure then from the earth.

from 'The Wait'

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.

Cover Image: Detail of Attic votive tablet depicting scenes of initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries, 4th century BC (terracotta). Copyright National Archaeological Museum, Athens / The Bridgeman Art Library.