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.