Collected Poems: Ian McDonald

From the vantage point of later middle life, Ian McDonald’s collection looks into the heart of time passing: the coming death of aging parents, the old men, the sight of ‘my own lines of age’ and the loss of pleasure in the glittering carnival of the senses. There are joys in the rich blessings of the arrival of a new child coming unexpected at this stage of life, but those joys are made more piquant by the inescapable sense of the ephemeral. Poems of moving domestic intimacy and humor (‘To...