Biting the Wax

'Biting the Wax is a quiet but convincing book, a strong first collection. Its diction is plain and its tone objective; yet nothing in Peter McDonald's world is predictable ('everything is possible and probable'). The very composure of the poems - their surface calm, their ostentatious style - sharpens the ominous and menacing atmosphere which pervades so many of them. Sunday in an English village on the day of Enniskillen, wartime outrages, the thoughts of Count Dracula - his imaginative, speculative, narrative compass is wide. The angle of vision is often beguilingly oblique, although riveting eye-to-eye contact is established in the longest poem, "Silent Night". Peter McDonald is skilful enough to render life in all its irony and absurdity without needing to raise his voice, strain for effect or resort to gimmickry. He trusts the language and, in the course of this absorbing debut. It generously replays that trust.' - Dennis O'Driscoll