The Gifts of Fortune

By Peter McDonald

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 working class boy in Belfast, who dreams of leaving, and a middle-aged 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 ten line 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Jul 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781784109448

Peter McDonald

Peter McDonald was born in Belfast in 1962, and educated at Methodist College, Belfast and University College, Oxford. He has published four books of literary criticism, and six volumes of poetry, most recently Herne the Hunter (2016). His Collected Poems appeared in 2012. He has lectured in English at the Universities of Cambridge and Bristol, and since 1999 has been Christopher Tower Student and Tutor in Poetry in the English Language at Christ Church, University of Oxford, where he is also Professor of British and Irish Poetry. He has edited the Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice (Faber, 2007), and is currently editing a multi-volume edition of the Complete Poems of W. B. Yeats for Longman.

Book preview

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