Snakeskin Stilettos

Moyra Donaldson’s voice is a woman’s voice—mother, daughter, wife, lover—tinged at times with anticipation, at times with regret. But always, the poet seeks the essence of life in the moment. In the title poem, she captures the wonder of emerging sexuality, as a girl finds her mother’s forbidden shoes and feels “Something/you’ve never felt before./These shoes are live and dangerous. A thoroughly modern poet, she does not avoid traditional forms, and she finds her imagery and metaphors, as those before her have, scattered in the harsh yet beautiful terrain of Ireland, her native land.

Moyra Donaldson lives in Northern Ireland. She has nine poetry collection, Snakeskin Stilettos, Beneath the Ice, The Horse’s Nest and Miracle Fruit, from Lagan Press, Belfast and an American edition of Snakeskin Stilettos, published in 2002 from CavanKerry Press. Her Selected Poems and The Goose Tree, were both published by Liberties Press, Dublin. Moyra has also collaborated with photographer Victoria J Dean, resulting in the art book Dis-ease and with visual artist Paddy Lennon, resulting in a limited edition book of poetry and paintings, Blood Horses, from Caesura Press. Her latest collection, Carnivorous was published by Doire Press, Spring 2019. In 2019, Moyra received a Major Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

Snakeskin Stilettos

Eight years old, you understand
these shoes are different.
Not for nothing
has your mother wrapped them in paper,
shut them into their box, set them
at the very back of the wardrobe.
Forbidden.

You imagine them-
on their own in the dark,
hissing softly.
Biding their time.

Sneak in, creak open the door,
lift the lid and let them out,
untissue the fear.
Run your fingers
against the fissley scales,
press the fangs of heels
into your palm.
Something
you’ve never felt before.
These shoes are live and dangerous

The publication of Moyra’s first collection . . . represents the discovery of a writer who, I believe, can go on to become one of Northern Ireland’s most accessible and popular poets. I know this is a big build- up but I am certain this work will be read and treasured by housewives, taxi drivers and professors. This writer has the surest of touches. Her work is so well crafted. The words come out almost perfectly. Each word is like a solid piece of rock that’s in just the right place at the right time. There is not a letter overwritten or wasted . . . And all conveyed with feeling and human guts into the bargain.
— Martin Lynch

It is a rare pleasure to come across a poetry that is a source of simple enjoyment . . . uniquely valuable in a social as well as a literary sense, charting as it so subtly does the emergence of a delightful, sensitive, all-embracing personality from a repressive religious environment . . . Her determination is to explore the realities . . . of living itself; then of living peculiarly as a married woman . . . The most attractive, never mind seductive, quality of this first collection is its honesty, a convincing intimacy of tone, rewarding us with the sense that we are being offered the truth and given a key to some of the most secret rooms of a heart.
— Medbh McGuckian

August 2002
70 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.5
$14
978-0-9707186-0-0