The House of Clay

"The House of Clay" is Peter McDonald's fourth book of poems, containing lyrics which combine intense resonance of narrative and imagery with powerful formal concentration. Autobiographical material, founded on a childhood in Belfast during the troubled 1970s, is developed and transformed by the book's other strands: poems on the contemporary Middle East, and poems drawing on Greek and Latin sources (including translations of Pindar and Virgil) build together into a moving and complex meditation on personal and historical loss. McDonald is one of the most widely-known (and most controversial) critics of modern British and Irish poetry; his poetry builds into itself the critical intelligence and anger of that context, along with the visionary intensity of an original, and impassioned imagination. "The House of Clay" creates a new and uncompromising kind of Irish poetry, in which the ancient and the modern, the pagan and the Northern Irish Protestant, find a piercingly clear register.