Walter McDonald is a Texas poet who has written of the dry, harsh landscape of west Texas in such a way as to universalize its rural themes. He is a soldier-poet whose evocations of Vietnam have found ready acceptance among others whose lives were also changed by that war. In his own words (in a 1986 interview with Christopher Woods), he is "more moved by struggle ... than by flaccid prettiness," so the reader does not find in McDonald's nature verse mere pastoral images, nor in his war poems mere sentimental renderings of buddies and experiences gone by. His style is clean, spare, and masculine, and he is likely to use hunting, fishing, farming, or flying an airplane as metaphors for existence. If Ernest Hemingway had grown up in west Texas and been a poet instead of a novelist, he might well have written poetry like McDonald's.

Born on 18 July...