All Occasions [Hardcover]

Award-winning poet Walt McDonald is well known for the skill with which he is able to transform ordinary language into poetry. In this, his eighteenth volume of poetry, McDonald returns to familiar explorations of his native Texas landscape and the struggle to integrate wartime experiences into the rest of life.

The 65 poems inAll Occasionsare about a boy who later flies as an Air Force pilot, who marries a woman so lovely and loving hes stunned, who goes home after a war and discovers with friends and family what John Donne meant in one Christmas sermon: All occasions invite His mercies, and all times are His seasons. The poems celebrate the wonder and need of all occasions, the heartache and longing and joy of being alone or lovedin war, in a cockpit at 40,000 feet, riding the range on a mustang, or in the arms of family.

In Carrion Comfort, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote about That night, that year / of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) / my God. In Part 2 ofAll Occasions, McDonald experiences that struggle in Vietnam and discovers over swift decades how deeply he needs friends, family, and God.

Each individual poem is finely crafted, and together they comprise a powerful narrative. Masterful and wise,All Occasionsis Walt McDonald at his best and his most affirmative.

Walt McDonald is Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of English at Texas Tech University, and the university's Poet in Residence. He has published more than 1,800 poems in journals and collections, and his books includeBlessings the Body Gave,Counting Survivors, andWhere Skies Are Not Cloudy.

Walt McDonaldsAll Occasionsblends 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 lightlC%