Matt Macdonald is a performer and poet based in Edinburgh. He often writes about ghosts and is rather obsessed with history, people, nature and the middle of the night. He has written more love poems than is strictly necessary and will spend most of the future writing some proper poems to balance that out. He has performed in the Edinburgh Fringe since 2012 and his debut pamphlet about the distance between Edinburgh and the Highlands, Who Are Your People?, was published in 2014. He has performed internationally in New York, North Carolina and Newcastle. 

petrichor is a collection concerned with what comes after. These poems were written in the gloaming of life; some following lost loves, some following lost lives, some following new loves, some following new stories. Each of these poems is a response to something, either a specific event, or, in some cases, the more general emotional resonances of life. If, as Robert Frost says, we stand long in front of the road diverging in the woods— these are the poems that spot would tell. 

‘I have had the privilege of reading many of the poems in this collection prior to publication and to have heard Matt Macdonald read his poems on his visit to the United States in 2016. My immediate response in both cases was: this young poet is the real deal. As a relative to Tessa Ransford there in Scotland, it’s clear that he has poetry in his DNA. Poems such as ‘Bloodlines’ and ‘The Silence of Good Ice Cream’ are evidence. These poems and lines like                  

  

beside the stonesewn pagan monoliths    

where the first children are born to frost    

they will understand the fires of the heart

remind me somewhat of those of Sorley MacLean whose family and heritage, like Matt’s and my own, comes from the Western Isles. And in poems such as ‘Paris’ his sparse, solipsistic style is reminiscent of e.e. cummings. And then, there are the love poems! With these poems and others in his literary arsenal, I would not be at all surprised if Matt, like Sorley, became a household name in Scotland before all is said and done.’
       —Thomas Rain Crowe, Publisher and Editor of New Native Press 

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