PastoralsPaperback, 31 August 2004

Peter McDonald invokes and explores the pastoral imagination, in love-poems and poems about grief, poems concerning remote history and the more recent past, and poems which find new shapes for our difficult, sometimes contradictory, relations to place and environment. Some longer pieces bring together these concerns: 'The Victory Weekend' sets the London VE-Day anniversary celebrations in 1995 against an adolescence in Belfast, while 'Eclogue' (an updating of Virgil) brings to post-Peace Process Belfast a debate between the exile and the stay-at-home.
McDonald's lyric variety and control (from sharp rhyming couplets to seventeenth-century heroic stanzas, from sonnets and unrhymed forms to Spenserian stanzas) make for memorable, sometimes haunted and unsettling, poetry.
Pastorals is Peter McDonald's first book for eight years, and confirms him as being among Ireland's most accomplished lyric poets.