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After the Noise of Saigon
Copyright © 19
by Walter McDonald
U of Masschussetts P, 1988
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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
the 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
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All That Matters
Copyright © 1992
by Walter McDonald
Texas Tech UP
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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
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Blessings the Body Gave
Copyright © 1998
by Walter McDonald
Ohio State UP
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The moral landscape to which David Citino refers is informed by the
experience of war. These poems deal with the loss of Walt McDonald's
father in World War II as well as with his own experiences in Vietnam.
They tell of living with the memories of war, of celebrating and coping
with the fact of survival, in the context of love of one's family in a place
at once harsh and beautiful. — from the jacket
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
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Counting Survivors
Copyright © 1995
by Walter McDonald
U of Pittsburgh P
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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. — Yusef
Komunyakaa
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The Digs in Escondido Canyon
Copyright © 1991
by Walter McDonald
Texas Tech UP
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Nobody has ever written better poetry about Texas than Walt McDonald."
— Andrew Hudgins
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Night Landings
Copyright © 1989
by Walter Mcdonald
Harper & Row
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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
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What the Critics Say
Bibliography