David Donaldson – författare

These poems, collected over thirty years, span times and places from the distant past to the present, and from natural and elemental settings too those we inhabit. They are poems of light and shade in equal measure, symptomatic, questioning, celebrating nature and human creativity as well as rising to challenge and protest, especially when it comes to the repeating tragedies of war.As a collection, it invites the reader to consider each poem from that perspective: the sense in which each represents a ‘homecoming’ whether to their human origins and past history, to Nature or to the challenges of the present and the reactions that such challenges evoke. What sort of ‘home ‘ is being created- freely or otherwise- for human beings and for all life on Earth?

Notions of ’progress’ can well lead to the positioning of the present as inevitably ‘better’ than the past. But when it comes to issues like the systematic exploitation of power for personal or group advantage and the ‘othering' of those who rise in protest, the echoes are still clear and pertinent today as are the current challenges of climate change and the threat from pandemics.Unfinished Business neither idealises the Middle Ages nor regards them as past times too removed or ‘uncivilised’ to have meaning or resonance. Despite the vast changes since in society, science and technology, these poems speak to what we share in common with the MIddle Ages: the unfinished business of so many still struggling for basic justice, freedom from want and the recognition of their human dignity.