From award-winning poet and one of the most important Northern Irish writers and critics of his generation, Peter McDonald, comes an earthy and sensual new collection. Drawing from the landscape of his native Ireland and indebted to the works of Heaney, Yeats and the Ancient Greek classics, each poem in Herne the Hunter reveres both the brutality and beauty of nature. From a hare caught in a trap resigned to its grim fate, to a despondent farmer's wife begging a calling tradesman to help her escape the life she's been confined to, McDonald contemplates death in its many forms in a style that is at once lyrical, muscular and erotic. Blood and soil permeate the pages; the scent lingers long after reading.

Peter McDonald was born and grew up in Belfast. He won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry and an Eric Gregory Award. A University teacher, he is currently Christopher Tower Student and Tutor in Poetry in the English Language at Christ Church, Oxford. A prominent critic of modern and contemporary poetry, he has published a book on Louis MacNeice, a study of Northern Irish poetry entitled Mistaken Identities, and, most recently, Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill. He has edited MacNeice's Selected Plays, and is also the editor of the forthcoming new edition of MacNeice's Collected Poems.