Adam's Dream

In Adam’s Dream, his second book of poems, Peter McDonald combines bold experiments in imagining the past with the kinds of formal control and invention which have marked his previous work. The ambitions and trials of the eighteenth-century Scottish architect Robert Adam feature alongside rewritings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Victorian fantasies and accounts of strange business in a modern Argentinian mausoleum. Throughout the book, in both the shorter poems and the longer pieces of dramatic monologue, as well as in the closing sequence of sonnets, McDonald dwells on subtle and troubling themes of reproduction, forgery and decay, inhabiting past and present with a complex originality. These poems put into play a linguistic alertness and a sense of lyric form which will secure McDonald’s place at the forefront of the younger generation of Northern Irish poets.