Peter McDonald

Life

1962- ; b. Belfast; ed. Methodist College, Belfast, and University College, Oxford (PhD 1987); junior research fellow, Christ Church, Oxford, 1986-1988; fellow and lecturer in English, Pembroke College, Cambridge; selections in Trio Poetry 3 (Belfast: Blackstaff 1982); New Chatto Poets (London: Chatto & Windus 1986); ed., Map-Maker’s Colours: New Poets of Northern Ireland (Montreal, Nu-Age Editions 1988); Newdigate Prize for Poetry, 1983; received the Eric Gregory Award, 1987;

first full-length collection, Biting the Wax (1989); moved to Univ. of Bristol; new collection, Adam’s Dream (1996); also Louis MacNeice: The Poet in His Contexts (OUP 1990); ed. with Alan Heuser, Selected Plays of Louis MacNeice (1991); appt. to snr. lectureship at Oxford; Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (1997), criticism, dealing especially with Seamus Heaney, MacNeice, and Mahon; he is an editor of poems of W. B. Yeats, the 3rd vol. (1899-1910) appearing from Routledge in 2023. ORM

[ top ]

Works

Poetry

with Johnston Kirkpatrick & Trevor McMahon, Trio Poetry, 3 (Belfast: Blackstaff 1982), 59pp.
Biting the Wax (Newcastle: Bloodaxe 1989, 1990), 64pp.
Adam’s Dream (Newcastle: Bloodaxe 1996), 64pp. [see note].
The House of Clay (Manchester: Carcanet Press 2006), 71pp.
Hermes the Hunter (Manchester: Carcanet Press 2016), 77pp. [see note].

Critical monographs

Louis MacNeice, the Poet in His Contexts (OUP 1991).
Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (OUP 1997), 240pp.
Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill (OUP 2002), 225pp. [[incls. ‘Yeats’s Poetic Structures’].
Sound Intentions: The Workings of Rhyme in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (2013).

Articles & contribs. (sel.)

‘Seamus Heaney as Critic’, in Poetry in Contemporary Irish Literature ed., Michael Kenneally [Studies in Contemporary Irish Literature 2] (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1995), pp.174-89.
‘The Poet and the Finished Man: Heaney’s Oxford Lectures’, in The Irish Review, 19 (Spring/Summer 1996) [q.pp.].
‘History and Poetry: Derek Mahon and Tom Paulin’, in Contemporary Irish Poetry: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Elmer Andrews (Macmillan 1996), pp.86-106.
‘Yeats and Remorse’ [Chatterton Lecture on Poetry, 31 Oct. 1996], in Proceedings of the British Academy, 94 (British Academy 1997), pp.173-206 [available as pdf - see online, or copy as attached; accessed 27.12.2024].
‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time: Arnold and Irish Culture’, in The Irish Review, 23 (Winter 1998), pp.94-104.
‘A Poem for All Seasons: Yeats, Meaning, and the Publishing History of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” in the 1890s’, in The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 29 [The Text as Evidence: Revising Editorial Principles (MHRA 1999), pp.202-30.
‘Louis MacNeice: Irony and Responsibility’ in The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry, ed. Matthew Campbell (Cambridge UP 2003), pp.59-75.
[...]
‘Rhyme, once in its prime, is in decline’, in The Economist (28 May 2025) [copy as attached].

Editions

ed., with Alan Heuser, Selected Plays of Louis MacNeice, ed. Alan Heuser and Peter McDonald (OUP 1994).
ed., Collected Poems by Louis MacNeice (London: Faber & Faber 2006; rep. 2013), 836pp.

Poems of W. B. Yeats - Routledge Edition:

Ed., W. B. Yeats - Poems. Vol. I: 1882-1889 (London: Routledge - 2020); Vol II: 1890-1898 (London: Routledge 2021); Vol. III: 1899-1910 (London: Routledge 2023), 474pp.

—details available at Taylor Francis - online; accessed 16.11.2023]

Reviews (sel.)

review of Early Poetry; Wild Swans; Michael Robartes; Winding Stair [Cornell UP ‘Manuscript Materials’], in Irish Literary Supplement, 27 Sept. 1996.
review of Keith Alldritt, W. B. Yeats: The Man and the Milieu, and Stephen Coote, W. B. Yeats: A Life, in Times Literary Supplement (9 Sept. 1997), p.26.
[...]
review of Letters of Louis MacNeice, ed. Jonathan Allison.

See also: A response to Denis Donoghue’s review of Alan Heuser, ed., Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNeice, in London Review of Books (23 April 1987).

[ top ]

Criticism
Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, ‘New Voices (Peter McDonald, Sinead Morrissey, Alan Gillis and Leontia Flynn)’, in Writing Home: Poetry and Place in Northern Ireland, 1968-2008 (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer 2008), pp.249-86. See also ‘Peter McDonald in conversation with Matthew Campbell’, in Patricia McCarthy, ed., Irish Poets in the UK (London: Agenda Poetry 2021) [q.pp.].

Reviews (sel.)
Adam Kirsch, ‘Formal Complaints’, review of Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill (OUP), 225pp., in Times Literary Supplement (29 Nov. 2002), p.6; Fiona Sampson, review of The House of Clay, in The Irish Times (3 March 2007), Weekend, p.13 [‘a writer of range as well as subtlety’].

See also John Kerrigan, ‘The Tickling Fear’, review of Collected Poems, ed. Peter McDonald, Selected Poems, ed. Michael Longley, with reps. of I Crossed the Minch (McNeice) and The Strings are False (MacNeice), in London Review of Books (7 Febn. 2008) [available online; accessed 21.05.2025].

Quotations
“The Thread”: How slightly, twenty years ago, / I managed to construe the girl / I met three times, or twice, then so / awkwardly flirted with, by proxy, / dispatching printed poems of mine / whose frail and thin-spun lines / took scarcely any weight (I see / that much), carried no weight at all. // In a bored moment, by sheer chance, / news of her death crosses my eyes, / and minutes pass while I realise / that now, at this distance, / I can’t so much as picture her, / feeling for the least snag or pull / in a line that’s barely visible, / and slighter than a thread of hair.’ (Times Literary Supplement, 20 Aug. 2004, p.4.)

“Partridge”

A little squeal, and then the sound
of a spring being tightly wound
in on itself, is all there is
at first, a sudden note and whizz-
whir coming from the bunched-up grass,
but maybe as the minutes pass
and you lie still, you start to see
a round bird moving clumsily,
all body, getting ready now
to risk the air, and chance a low
flight that will take it further out
from the covey: as if in doubt,
and happier with the ground below,
it hesitates; it doesn’t go.

—from Hermes the Hunter (2106); printed by Tom ’Evelyn with commentary [online] 01.05.2016).

Kitsch-friendly: reviewing Keith Alldritt, W. B. Yeats (1997), and Stephen Coote, W. B. Yeats (1997), in Times Literary Supplement (19 Sept. 1997), MacDonald remarks on a kind of ‘kitsch reader-friendliness’ of the one, and a digression in the other based on the mistranscription of ‘Kent’ for ‘Kew’ in Denis Donoghue’s edn. of the Memoirs; ‘it is worth remembering that biography, practised in this way, is as happy dealing in fictions as in facts.’

[ top ]

References

Included in Irish anthologies (sel.):

Gerald Dawe, ed., The New Younger Irish Poets (Belfast: Blackstaff 1982; rev. edn. 1991);
Patrick Crotty ed., Modern Irish Poetry: An Anthology (1995)
Justin Quinn, ed., Irish Poetry After Feminism [Princess Grace Irish Library in Monaco Lectures, 10] (Colin Smythe, 2008).

Patrick Crotty, ed., Modern Irish Poetry: An Anthology (Belfast: Blackstaff Press 1995), selects “Sunday in Great Tew” [416]; “Peacetime” [419]

Notes
Adam’s Dream (1996): In [...] his second book of poems, Peter McDonald combines bold experiments in imagining the past with the kinds of formal control and invention which have marked his previous work. The ambitions and trials of the eighteenth-century Scottish architect Robert Adam feature alongside rewritings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Victorian fantasies and accounts of strange business in a modern Argentinian mausoleum. Throughout the book, in both the shorter poems and the longer pieces of dramatic monologue, as well as in the closing sequence of sonnets, McDonald dwells on subtle and troubling themes of reproduction, forgery and decay, inhabiting past and present with a complex originality. These poems put into play a linguistic alertness and a sense of lyric form which will secure McDonald's place at the forefront of the younger generation of Northern Irish poets. (Publisher’s notice via Amazon.)

Hermes the Hunter (2016) - From award-winning poet and one of the most important Northern Irish writers and critics of his generation, Peter McDonald, comes an earthy and sensual new collection. Drawing from the landscape of his native Ireland and indebted to the works of Heaney, Yeats and the Ancient Greek classics, each poem in Herne the Hunter reveres both the brutality and beauty of nature. From a hare caught in a trap resigned to its grim fate, to a despondent farmer's wife begging a calling tradesman to help her escape the life she's been confined to, McDonald contemplates death in its many forms in a style that is at once lyrical, muscular and erotic. Blood and soil permeate the pages; the scent lingers long after reading. (Publisher’s notice via Amazon.)

Family home: Peter was brought up at 44a Woodview Drive, Belfast, BT5 7PY (UK).

[ top ]