All Occasions

By: Walt McDonald

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Paperback | 15 October 2000

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118 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
20.96 x 13.97 x 0.64

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Award-winning poet Walt McDonald is well known for the skill with which he is able to transform ordinary language into poetry. In this, his eighteenth volume of poetry, McDonald returns to familiar explorations of his native Texas landscape and the struggle to integrate wartime experiences into the rest of life.

The 65 poems in All Occasions are about a boy who later flies as an Air Force pilot, who marries a woman so lovely and loving he's stunned, who goes home after a war and discovers with friends and family what John Donne meant in one Christmas sermon: "All occasions invite His mercies, and all times are His seasons". The poems celebrate the wonder and need of all occasions, the heartache and longing and joy of being alone or loved -- in war, in a cockpit at 40,000 feet, riding the range on a mustang, or in the arms of family.

In "Carrion Comfort", Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote about "That night, that year / of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God ) my God". In Part 2 of All Occasions, McDonald experiences that struggle in Vietnam and discovers over swift decades how deeply he needs friends, family, and God.

Each individual poem is finely crafted, and together they comprise a powerful narrative. Masterful and wise, All Occasions is Walt McDonald at his best and his most affirmative.

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Acknowledgments
One Morning between Wars	p. 3
The Second Time Around	p. 5
One Steep Switchback at a Time	p. 6
Backpacking with My Bride in the Rockies	p. 7
In the Alchemist's Household	p. 9
800 Acres on the Plains	p. 10
The Winter Our Grandson Turned Thirteen	p. 11
After the Children Leave	p. 12
At Dawn with the Blinds Raised	p. 13
The Midas Touch in Texas	p. 14
Batting Practice at Sixty	p. 15
Swaggering to the Flight Line	p. 19
Marching through Georgia	p. 21
Cousin Eddie and the Jungle Trails	p. 22
When Rockets Fell Like Stars	p. 23
Wings Tumbling like a Torch	p. 24
Gigging for Frogs before the War	p. 26
Bogeyman, 1969	p. 27
But It Was Water	p. 29
Beside the Dark-Sheened Water	p. 30
That Silence When A Mountain Lion Attacks	p. 32
To the Tribe	p. 34
For Friends Missing in Action	p. 35
The Summer Her Family Moved to Houston	p. 39
Barter	p. 40
Chocolate	p. 41
Grandfathers	p. 43
Growing Up by the Brazos	p. 44
Grandmother Bankhead's Lake	p. 46
Boys and Their Fathers' Shotguns	p. 47
Uncle Croom's Attic	p. 48
As Time Goes By	p. 49
Grandfather and the Boys He Knew in School	p. 51
First Solo in Thunder	p. 52
Instant Replay	p. 53
The Last Pullman to Houston	p. 54
Wishing for Friends from Childhood	p. 55
Facing It	p. 57
Diamonds in the Carnegie Museum	p. 61
The Songs of Country Girls	p. 62
Bull-Necked and Square-Jawed after Saigon	p. 63
My Father and the Sad Soap Operas	p. 64
All Dogs Are Pirates	p. 65
Hardscrabble, Tooth and Claw	p. 66
Abandoned Shack in Bankhead National Forest	p. 67
Search and Rescue in the Mountains	p. 68
John Parker and the Captured Mount	p. 70
Reading Ecclesiastes at Sixty	p. 72
A Thousand Miles of Stars	p. 74
In the Shallow Molasses	p. 76
Watching Parades in the Game Room	p. 77
The Risk of Having Children	p. 79
Killing Nothing but Time	p. 83
Leaving Sixty	p. 85
After the Random Tornado	p. 86
I Still Can't Say the Word	p. 87
When Baseball Was a Game	p. 88
Fire and Ice	p. 89
Before the Glaciers Melt	p. 91
Raising a Glass for Grandsons	p. 93
Faith Is a Radical Master	p. 94
Old Pilots in the Crowd at Kitty Hawk	p. 95
Five Fathoms Down off Hatteras	p. 97
Boiling Shells at Kitty Hawk	p. 99
Watching Dawn on Padre Island	p. 101
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

All Occasions

At a Glance

Paperback

Shipping

How to return your order

Defective items

You Can Find This Book In

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