The Goose Tree

By Moyra Donaldson

"Moyra Donaldson's poetry has grown to ignite unexpected perceptions and magnify them. Betrayals, personal and political; excavations, historical and psychic; correspondences of temperament and object; innocences pristine and varied and very much in power. The Goose Tree shows a poet treading on her own footprints; the considerable themes of her career advanced in perspective and colour and with the happy skills of a poet both accomplished and mature but alert still to surprise, both in form and substance: like her 'village women who waited/In their beds for the sound of wings'. A joyous collection." - Damian Smyth Moyra Donaldson's work has been hailed as 'urbane, modern, and sophisticated . . . ambitious in its scope, and speaking with a rare authority.' Whatever the subject matter - be it anatomy, death, life, sex, or the natural world - Donaldson writes with a keen knowledge of the connection between the private and the public, the past and the present, the local and the universal. A masterful new collection from one of Ireland's leading poets.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Liberties Press
• Release date: Apr 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9781909718500

Book preview

A Winter Gift

How much further you can see

when the trees are bare,

the countryside open to the bones

of itself, stark and absolute,

stripped to essentials.

The first time you feel it,

contentment is a strange

sensation: what is this

settling on me?

you wonder.

It is the gift of snow,

drifting, deep.

To the Current Occupants of My Parents’ House

I need no key, no invitation; whether

you are in or out, I come and go

as I please and even in the dark

I intimately know my way

from room to room, with all

the secret spaces in between,

every creak of door or stairs,

every layer of paint and tears.

I look in the bathroom mirror,

often lie down on my own