Walt McDonald
Email walt.mcdonald@ttu.edu
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 © Walt McDonald, 2006
 Updated 8/30/06

 

Some Book-Jacket Comments about Walt's Books


After the Noise of Saigon, University of Massachusetts Press, 1988:

  • "Walter McDonald's poems are records of human endurance in hard times and harsh places. Without bitterness, but with a wondering sorrow, he writes of the hardscrabble part of Texas where he grew up, and he writes also of Southeast Asia, where he served.... The disturbing juxtaposition of these two frontiers--distant, and in such different ways inhospitable--is one of the most striking features of this book. McDonald understands the survivor's sense of guilt and continuing jeopardy; his war veterans and cowboys, his pilots and his rodeo fool haunt us with the ironic ordinariness of their heroism." -- Robert B. Shaw

 

Night Landings, Harper & Row, 1989:

  • "Walter McDonald is a truly human voice speaking from the air. These are remarkable poems, written from the vision of a man sustained by machinery in terror and exhilaration above the planet. The experience of McDonald's words is as unique as flight itself." -- James Dickey 

 

The Digs in Escondido Canyon, Texas Tech University Press, 1991:

  • "The poems of Walt McDonald's The Digs in Escondido Canyon are set in the hardscrabble of West Texas and derive a great deal of their power from the land itself. The rest of their deep power comes from McDonald: his clear, but never cold, eye; his sure sense of phrase and rhythm; his love of a land that requires much love from those who would love it. Nobody has ever written better poetry about Texas than Walt McDonald."  -- Andrew Hudgins

 

All That Matters: The Texas Plains in Photographs and Poems, Texas Tech University Press, 1992:

  • "Ever since discovering Walter McDonald's work, I've been moved by its evocation of the spirit of his native West Texas plains--their climate and topography and natural life, their spaciousness and sometimes starkness, and the way all these things interweave with people and history and lore. Intelligent, sensitive, perceptive, and uncomplaining, this man knows not only who but where he is, and in a quietly masculine way, with clean, strong, unsentimental words and images, he celebrates that whereness."   -- John Graves
  • "Walter McDonald is one of the best poets in America, and there is no better place to encounter his work than in this haunting album of words and pictures. His poems, and the photographs that accompany them, are stark and moody and strong. Together, they do honor to the landscape of the Texas Plains, to a region that McDonald unforgettably describes as "a thousand miles of parchment / under the will of heaven."  -- Stephen Harrigan

 

Counting Survivors, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995:

  • "A calm turbulence stirs beneath the textured surface of Walter McDonald's Counting Survivors, and we realize the speakers are witnesses, that we are lucky to share their moments of terror and beauty.... There aren't any jagged edges to these highly crafted poems, and they give us a resounding clarity that takes us from Saigon to the semirural Southwest. Here's a poetry we can believe and trust, without any showy pyrotechnics to deflect the heartfelt storytelling." -- Yusef Komunyakaa 
  • "In the poems of Walter McDonald I often sense a pair of sharp and experienced eyes scanning a distant horizon, watching for meaningful movement, while the steady heart and quick mind light on ways of bringing home the news. Counting Survivors is solid and true." -- Henry Taylor

 

Blessings the Body Gave, Ohio State University Press, 1998:

  • "McDonald once again looks keenly, as only he can, at all four horizons of his seemingly limitless Texas landscape.... Poem by poem we share this poet's acute sense of place. This is the American West, and McDonald a realist who sites his poems in a moral landscape amid the steers and hawks and barbed-wire fences and Stetsons." -- David Citino

 

Whatever the Wind Delivers:  Celebrating West Texas and the Near Southwest, Texas Tech University Press, 1999:

  • "The spring-clear, incisive poems of Walt McDonald are interspersed with gritty, often arresting archival photographs to produce an exciting mix of imagination and history."  -- Billy Collins
  • "There are four or five kinds of writers, and one is the kind who simply goes home and finds his true and best subject there. He stays and is enriched by his native country and in turn enriches it. Walter McDonald is that kind of writer."  -- Donald Justice
  • "Whatever the Wind Delivers is a stunning labor of love for the land of vast horizons. Walt McDonald's gracious poems embody his characteristic wide vision, wit, and generosity of spirit. No one else's voice could have given more dignity and gravity to this project."  -- Naomi Shihab Nye
  • "Walt McDonald knows the land of West Texas and the near southwest from the bone out. He breathes it. He lives within it. He is made of it. And he has produced a poetry that perfectly resonates with the sound and motion, the cadences and cares of the land, the life and the people that are his subjects."  -- Pattiann Rogers

 

All Occasions, Univesity of Notre Dame Press, 2000.

  • "Walt McDonald's All Occasions blends the personal and historical; what rises to the surface is a graceful realism that cannot be sidestepped. These narratives travel a landscape peopled by flesh-and-blood characters who offer folk wisdom schooled by psyches revealed in the lyrical dark and light."  -- Yusef Komunyakaa
  • "The speakers on these pages are engaged in the performing of duties, chores, and labors of the heart and soul.  They ride out into the weather to learn the lay of the land; they learn to love, to fly, to war, paying attention all the while to the moral implications of their actions and inactions....  Walt McDonald helps us see the miracles breaking out all around us--in fact, he flies us to them, sets us down gently nearby.  Together--poet and reader--we're amazed."  --David Citino


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