… to hell with hell.
Hell is the heart breaking.
                                            — 'Leaves'

The Stone Jug is the third collection of poems by Frank McGuinness. The first of its three parts is a series of evocations of his native Buncrana in County Donegal, 'my home town, my hard town'; another is rooted in the styles and subjects of Old English poetry. The centrepiece of the collection is 'Gyrfalcon', a sequence of sixty sonnets whose ecstatic energies embrace affairs, recriminations and a set of ghostings by the dead. 'I believe only in what's rough, red and raw', he writes — a claim this edgy, ferocious, passionate work supports.