"Walt McDonald's All Occasions blends the personal and historical; what rises to the surface is a graceful realism that cannot be sidestepped. These narratives travel a landscape peopled by flesh-and-blood characters who offer folk wisdom schooled by psyches revealed in the lyrical dark and light." —Yusef Komunyakaa
"Family, war, loss, recovery, the sorrows and joys of the sensory world—these are the themes Walt Mcdonald has spent a lifetime exploring, and they surface again, but deepened, transmuted, in this exquisite new book, in language that slams back, shatters, hunkers down, muses, woos, and soothes." —Ronald Wallace, Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Wisconsin Madison and author of Quick Bright Things: Stories and The Uses of Adversity: Sonnets
"As in some of his other books, Walt McDonald draws here on his experiences in Vietnam. But this book reaches deeper than that, to moments from childhood and youth in a stark landscape; so what we find here is not only what he brought home from the war, but what he took to it. There is a generous largeness of spirit, and an amazing knack for the haunting phrase." —Henry Taylor
"Underlying the rich poems of love and life on the Texas plains, Walt McDonald's All Occasions is haunted by the history of America's wars in the twentieth century, and the sacrifices they required. The poems explore not just his own memories of Vietnam and his fear and pride at his son's combat in Desert Storm, but also his grandfathers' , uncles' and father's service in the two world wars. In its quiet and meditative way, it is a death-haunted book. Out of that meditation on the terrible costs of life rises a guilty but real gratitude in being alive." —Andrew Hudgins
"I've been reading Walt McDonald for years. His is the voice among contemporary poets most recognizable to me. This is not to say that his poems are without surprise (and therefore delight), or that he hasn't grown and developed over the decades. In the same way we know Sinatra, or Willy, or Aretha, we recognize Walt McDonald, an American original. All Occasions gives us, page after page, one of our finest poets at the top of his game." —David Citino, Professor of English
"Walt McDonald, like Edwin Arlington Robinson or William Stafford, is an American treasure who fashions from everyday speech a pure and electric poetry. He breaks lines better than most contemporary poets, and his concerns, both modest and universal, search out the region we should hold in the highest regard, the heart, and breaks it—its motions of grace, pity, and fear, its yearning like love to leave in one's wake a healthier atmosphere, if not a better world, for all one holds in affection, a shoring up against those days when all occasions seem indeed to inform against us: a beautiful book." —Larry Woiwode, author of Beyond the Bedroom Wall and What I Think I Did
"Walt McDonald has always written moving poems of immense compassion and care. For him, poetry is indeed everywhere, detailing and infusing All Occasions with layered mystery and grace. Give his words to anyone you know who doubts this. Or believe it already. He will befriend them, every one." —Naomi Shihab Nye, writer and editor
