The Waltz He Was Born for: An Introduction to the Writing of Walt McDonald

Texas Poet Laureate Walt McDonald has published more than eighteen volumes of award-winning poetry. A poet of the landscape, of war and flying, of people just working hard, McDonald is master of the vital image and sound. And he is a poet whose work invites writers such as these gathered here to find and define the elements that delight and fascinate. Each contributor to this volume has followed his own trek of discovery in McDonald’s harsh landscapes of arroyos and hardscrabble, in his skies filled with joy and terrors, in those night sweats of pilots. Here, in the territory Walt McDonald has claimed, these writers have found gold. Their essays analyze McDonald’s writings about war and the veteran’s return to civilian life, the regional grounding of his far-reaching verities, and the writer himself. Some discuss his aesthetic strategies; others examine McDonald in relation to other writers. Still others explore the religious imagery, thought, and implications of McDonald’s poetry. One looks at the poet within the context of his fiction, A Band of Brothers, McDonald’s elegiac and only collection of short stories. Concluding the study is an interview with McDonald. "[His] is the voice of Texas, a landscape that has inspired countless pages of fine prose, but had lacked its defining poet before McDonald, with what seems in retrospect like astonishing ease, filled the role.” from Andrew Hudgins’s introduction “What McDonald does―has always done―is to offer a modest proposal for stemming what he eloquently depicts as an unconscionable moment in life. He knows that the race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, so he pleads for a sort of cosmic compassion, even if the compassion is unearned and the cosmos fundamentally merciless.” ―Jerry Bradley