Customer Reviews

All Occasions

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Emily Diskinson said, "I know it is poetry if I feel as if the top of my head has come off." Walt McDonald's collection, All Occasions, is that kind of poetry; his celebration of the ordinary moment turns mundane life experiences into significant events and transforms ordinary observations into profound ideas. In this collection, his skillful use of sound and diction go beyond his previous works as he continues to create fresh images to explore the experiences of childhood, war, marriage and family, ranching, life and death.

The collection contains 65 poems in five sections, each section more forceful and meditative than the one before. An elegiac tone characterizes the poems of remembrance, as in "Cousin Eddie and the Jungle Trails." These are flavored not with sappy sentimentalism, but with a pensive purity that stirs and satisfies. McDonald's aubades, such as "Backpacking with My Bride in the Rockies" and "Before the Glaciers Melt," are unique in that the lovers do not part in the morning, though a hint of time passing and a clear sense of place enhance the portrayal of the love relationship. McDonald includes a villanelle, "Gigging for Frogs before the War," and a slant-rhymed sonnet, "Hardscrabble, Tooth and Claw," among the free verse poems of various stanza forms. Internal rhyme and repeated key words set a pace that fits each poem.

As he is accustomed to doing, McDonald occasionally reuses titles from previous poems, dealing with the same theme on an increasingly more mature level, with magnified implosive power. Two such repeats are "For Friends Missing in Action" and "Leaving Sixty."

Whether recalling people, exploring relationships, or narrating events, McDonald makes casual moments sing with celebratory songs that echo emotion and evoke empathy. He uses language that snags the imagination like a fishhook, pulls, draws, and carries the reader along from line to line, stanza to stanza, like a rainbow stripped trout reeled in. "Boys and Their Fathers' Shotguns," in Section Three, is a poem about an accidental shooting. Word choice that maximizes assonance, consonance, and alliteration carries one through the poem and sends him back for a second read--not because it is obscure but because it is powerful and moving: because it takes the top of the head off.

If there is any weakness in the collection, it is only that a few poems are less than lucid, a little out of focus, like a boat in the fog--headed somewhere, though the direction is not clear. "After the Random Tornado" and "Fire and Ice" appear like wispy clouds whose main purpose is to accent the sky's blue hue. But even that is an occasion to celebrate.

McDonald's poetry just keeps getting better in form and content. This collection, All Occasions, is definitely worth buying.