Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 08/10/2026“Reflects the sunsets of a thousand years”: the English heroic line, perfectly timed. 030
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 06/10/2026But don’t bother trying: not worth the effort! Nobody cares about these shortlists anyway - totally pointless. 020
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 02/10/2026Been there, done that. (From my book Pastorals, 2004). 010
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 28/09/2026William Barnes. If this isn’t a great poem, I don’t know what is. 010
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 27/09/2026He knew a thing or two about grave robbing, reportedly. 010
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 27/09/2026Hah! I showed this one the door in my Collected nota bene… 110
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 26/09/2026Surely nobody actually buys this stuff? Thanks (I suppose) for those priceless Greenlaw quotes, which are sure astonishingly pure nonsense. How the hell to books like that get published? Oh, wait… 220
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 22/09/2026One of the many gems of Dublin folklore about Yeats, recorded by Richard Ellmann in 1946. 0144
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 21/09/2026Pindar, in a way. (Only last line is a direct translation , of fr.36a. The rest half-imitation, half something else.) From my book The House of Clay (2007). 092
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 18/09/2026I think poetry improvisation whilst playing Kok-boru with a headless goat carcass would be the real test. 020
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 18/09/2026A mock-epic maybe? “The Rape of the Locks”, in which Daljit makes off with Simon’s trademark hairstyle? 010
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 17/09/2026There’s not a day goes by without my giving thanks for the fact that I don’t have to “promote poetry” any more. Pushing poetry is like pushing really useless drugs that nobody will ever want. And just imagine actually campaigning to be next Laureate like this… Alexander Pope where are you? 120
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 16/09/2026I’ve always thought this, by A.E. Housman about his late colleague Arthur Platt, one of the best paragraphs of English prose there is. But more than that too: like Johnson at his finest, he also has emotional truths to tell, almost too true to tell at all. 060
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 14/09/2026Altogether a bit of a Bauls-up. (Larkin, thou shouldst be living at this hour...) 010
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 12/09/2026Finally we discover there was a poet Seamus didn’t rate very highly! Not that he said so, mind you. 010
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 12/09/2026A Michael Longley poem for a President to give Trump? This one. (I hope Connolly would commend it to the Irish as well.) 020
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 07/09/2026Lionel Johnson (WB Yeats's friend) writing in 1891. Plenty here that still has critical point, I think. 141
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 03/09/2026Louis MacNeice, who died in London sixty-three years ago today. 1122
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 02/09/2026I love a good misprint. Here in the NY magazine Current Opinion (Dec 1917) unsuspecting young men are getting a whiff of Maud Gonne as she goes by … Probably all that French cooking. 000
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 27/08/2026It’s a depressing read - you can feel how bored and worn down he was by the whole thing. He needed the money, though I don’t expect there was much of that. 020
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 27/08/2026I gave Geoffrey Hill’s posthumous Baruch a largely disappointed review (in Stand) when it came out. My reservations remain - but it does contain great things, like this section on Yeats and ‘Easter 1916’. 021
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 25/08/2026And: Poets, indeed, profess fiction; but the legitimate end of fiction is the conveyance of truth; and he that has flattery ready for all whom the vicissitudes of the world happen to exalt, must be scorned as a prostituted mind, that may retain the glitter of wit, but has lost the dignity of virtue. 130
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 25/08/2026cp. The Rambler 47 The safe and general antidote against sorrow, is employment. It is commonly observed, that among soldiers and seamen, though there is much kindness, there is little grief; ... Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul, which every new idea contributes in its passage to scour away. 110
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 22/08/2026And what a great title for a collection that would be! 010
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 22/08/2026Ordinarily, I’d stop reading at “box wine”. But I pressed on to the end: I agree, truly dull. Also: self-comforting, finally mawkish … I could go on. 110
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 16/08/2026Such a poem at such an early age. Think what he might have gone on to, and what witnessed, had he made the three score and ten. And happy birthday! 010
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 15/08/2026The story went that, after dinner and from behind a wall of pipe smoke, he used to read it to guests. All of it. (That’s one way to get rid of them, I suppose.) 030
Reposted by Peter McDonaldA. E. Stallings @aestallings.bsky.social · 06/08/2026Well, for better or worse, my Odyssey review is out: www.the-tls.com/arts/film/th...the-tls.comShowdowns and shootoutsIn the past week, I enjoyed two movies at Athens’s outdoor summer cinemas (my favourite summer activity: the scent of basil and jasmine, the shadows of 0175
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 05/08/2026www.the-tls.com/classics/cro... My review of Emily Wilson and Henry Power in the new TLS.the-tls.comEnglished Homer“It is probable”, Alexander Pope wrote in his translation of the Iliad (1715–20), “the author’s own words, at the time he used them, never meant half so 082
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 26/07/2026I visited Siena a few years later, and hung around Fonte Branda for about an hour, waiting for the fireflies. They didn’t show up. 010
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 26/07/2026Such a powerful piece of writing: it knocked me sideways when I was about nineteen - so much so, that I cribbed heavily from it for a little poem written then, which was in my (now forgotten, thank God) selection in Blackstaff’s Trio Poetry 3 (1983). 000
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 18/07/2026Emily Wilson’s Odyssey: so good she’s doing it twice. (From Prospect magazine.) I do wish Alexander Pope was alive to do this stuff justice… 000
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 06/07/2026www.carcanet.co.uk/978178410176... Ten years old now, but if this is indeed going to be a Homeric summer, a few people might be interested in tracking it down now. The material is odd, yes; but I do hope (he says modestly) this is the best translation available. (Well sort of available...)carcanet.co.ukThe Homeric HymnsA 2016 Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation The Homeric Hymns are a crucial work in the Western literary canon, and Peter McDonald’s new verse tran... 000
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 06/07/2026www.carcanet.co.uk/978178410176... Ten years old now, but if this is indeed going to be a Homeric summer, a few people might be interested in tracking it down now. The material is odd, yes; but I do hope (he says modestly) this is the best translation available. (Well sort of available...)carcanet.co.ukThe Homeric HymnsA 2016 Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation The Homeric Hymns are a crucial work in the Western literary canon, and Peter McDonald’s new verse tran... 000
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 01/07/2026Very good indeed (and of course). Ash Keys was published while he was alive though - at least, he signed my copy! A posthumous collection, The Night Before Spring, will be published in early 2027, and it’s wonderful. 020
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 30/06/2026These remarks of Hazlitt have been endlessly chewed over, and I won’t add to that. I do think left and right are slightly misleading in early 19th c. context, but H probably correct about all this in some sense. I can well imagine Shakespeare going for the “arbitrary side” of things… 010
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 27/06/2026There’s a Michael Longley poem for most situations, isn’t there? (From The Slain Birds, 2022) 070
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 19/06/2026We may not know much about Shakespeare, but we do know he was keen on flowers - nowadays, he would surely be one of the (very few?) poets capable of successfully fronting a tv gardening show. 230
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 17/06/2026By Jack Yeats, perhaps c.1887. Quite a pose. 073
Peter McDonald @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social · 13/06/2026A reason for keeping silent I think it better that at times like these We poets keep our mouths shut; for in truth We have no gift to set a statesman right; He’s had enough of meddling who can please A young girl in the indolence of her youth Or an old man upon a winter’s night. WBY b.13 Jun 1865 010
