The poems in One Little Room enter and explore confined spaces in history and personal memory. The spaces prove not to be as small as they seem from the outside: they expand and interconnect to produce new and dazzling perspectives out of the limits of concentrated meditation and formal shape alike.
Poems inhabit the surroundings of a Belfast childhood, pushing these into dimensions where time and space play tricks on memory and circumstance. Boxes, lost travelling trunks, and small volumes enclosed in the dark are transformed into bright gateways to freshly imagined realities. Public and private histories undergo radical reconstruction in the sequence ‘Centenary’, where a hundred years of Northern Ireland and the century since the birth of the poet’s father coincide to produce a different kind of history; a series of discursive poems addressed to different women mark, like standing stones, the book’s developing engagements with past, present and future. From Harry Houdini in a milk-churn to the French poet St.-John Perse in the same room with Hitler; from Emerson in New England to Yeats at Rosses Point and Omaha Beach; and from the work on free paraphrases of the Psalms to the work done in a carpet-fitter’s cutting room in the 1970s, poems here repeatedly turn confinement inside-out. In this, his eighth collection, Peter Mc Donald effects transformations of memory and history, loss and love.
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Peter Mc Donald was born in Belfast in 1962. His first book of poetry, Biting the Wax, was published in 1989, and since then seven volumes of his verse have appeared, including his Collected Poems (2012). He has written four books of literary criticism, including Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (1997) and Sound Intentions: The Workings of Rhyme in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (2012), and has edited Louis Mac Neice’s Collected Poems (2007) and most recently three volumes of the Longman Poems of W.B. Yeats. He is Emeritus Professor of British and Irish Poetry at Oxford University, and an Emeritus Student of Christ Church, Oxford.
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