He resists the over-dramatic, but is a poet of fierce feeling - moved and often moving.' Michael Longley, CBE Praise for Peter McDonald 'McDonald is often impressively adept at using varied metres for cadence, musicality, tension. disenchanted vision makes the moments of intimacy and tenderness, when they come, all the more affecting.' 'Peter McDonald's unsettling imagination occupies a middle distance between domesticity and wilderness. This book revives an ancient classic for the twenty-first century. The accompanying notes and commentaries on the poems are the most generous and authoritative of any translation. Two appendices provide verse translations of episodes from Homer’s Odyssey and Hesiod’s Theogony, while McDonald gives fresh versions throughout of relevant passages from Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and other Greek poets. The book includes a new translation of the ‘Life of Homer’, a narrative incorporating the shorter poems known as Homer’s Epigrams, attributed to Pseudo-Herodotus. Some of the poems are micro-epics in their own right, recounting the lives and affairs of the divine taken together, they form a meditation on the primal themes of love, war, betrayal, desire, and paternity, and contemplate the dangerous proximity of gods and men. The thirty-three ‘hymns’ are poetic accounts of ancient Greek gods, including Apollo, Dionysus, Aphrodite, Zeus, and Poseidon. The Homeric Hymns are a crucial work in the Western literary canon, and Peter McDonald’s new verse translations offer the major modern account of this still under-appreciated body of ancient poetry. A 2016 Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation
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