The Saint Lawrence River glides beneath high windows while, close by, schoolchildren's bright winter coats glow in Parthenais Prison's shade. In a hotel on a cliff above Biarritz, a man peers down into a darkened courtyard and thinks he hears low sobbing through the plashing of a fountain. In an east coast fishing village, a bedridden child experiences heightened lucidity in delirium. A slum landlord in Prince Rupert gives lessons on the British Empire. These are a few moments in The Port Inventory. Spanning the distances between the Newfoundland fishing village where he grew up and Montreal, the city he has made his home, McGrath's poems drop a ladder into memory's root cellar and find it luminescent.

Donald McGrath grew up in a fishing village on Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula, leaving at nineteen to study at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. He has been a longshoreman, factory worker and waiter, and currently works as a translator in Montreal. He has published one previous poetry collection, At First Light (1995). His poems have appeared widely in periodicals, and one was selected for the longlist Web anthology of the 2011 Montreal Poetry Prize.

Donald McGrath's profile page