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MOYRA DONALDSON is a poet and creative writing facilitator from County Down. She has published eight collections of poetry, including a Selected Poems and most recently, Carnivorous from Doire Press. Her awards include the Women’s National Poetry Competition, The Allingham Award, Cúirt New Writing Award, North West Words Poetry Award and the Belfast Year of the Writer Award. She has received five awards from the ACNI, including the Major Artist Award in 2019. Her poems have featured on BBC Radio and television, as well as on American national radio and television. She has read at festivals in Europe, Canada and America. Moyra has been involved in an array of other projects, including a collaboration with photographic artist Victoria J Dean, resulting in an exhibition and the publication Abridged 0 -36 Dis-Ease. Blood Horses, a collaboration with Wexford artist Paddy Lennon, culminated in a limited-edition pub-lication of artworks and poems. She has also worked with Big Telly Theatre Company on a number of projects.
This book is to savor, a volume to return to as the poems reveal their fullest meanings. Behind all the work is that 'small, secretive animal of self' that Donaldson captures.
— Maria Wallace
In the movie of her life
My young mother walks across a beach,
the tide is out, I’m in the pram she pushes
over the wet sand; the man walking beside her
says he’d bring me up as his own,
if she’d come back to him.
She remembers freedom,
Armagh dance halls,
her fingers playing tunes
on the button accordion;
arms around him
on the back of his motorbike
before her father came
to bring her home
where she belonged.
She drives me home
to where her husband waits,
my father —
and we all live in the bed
she’s made for us.
Made Flesh
beware the god who constructs Himself
as human — what does divinity know of us
mortal fragile afraid
beware the god who constructs Himself
as father — he has eaten his pregnant wife
ordered the murder of daughters
and the slaughter of nations
on a divine whim
or for mysterious reasons
beware the god who constructs Himself
as son — he is always his father’s
perspective
beware the god who constructs Himself
as any earthly creature — bull or swan
his desires are never sated
The Devil’s Rope
In the Kansas Barbed Wire Museum
there are over two thousand four hundred
varieties; Diamond Point right twist,
Burnell four point, Brinkerhoff, Scutt,
Decker, Brotherton — to name a few —
and the Glidden two point, called
for Joseph Glidden, who registered
the patent, made a clean fortune.
So boundaries were drawn across the plains
as farmers fenced their one sixty acres.
No more open spaces, nowhere to roam.
Plains tribes and buffalo herds constricted,
no longer able to move freely,
no seasonal migrations, expanses vanishing
along with fifteen thousand years of culture.
Tribes and buffalo annihilated.
And then this devil’s rope ubiquitous
on battle fields and between trenches,
in concentration camps,
along borders.
And I saw how it ripped the legs
of the little black mare
caught up in it; her every struggle
winding it tighter.
today the bees
are throwing themselves
into the dark stamened hearts
of the oriental poppies
in a frenzied humming
and the poppies’ petals
are hallucinatory red
seen through the fierce lens
of summer sun’s synaptic flare
I want my dog back
I want my friend back
back properly
solid in their bodies
I want to dandle the baby
— unlost — on my knee
and though I know
time takes this past you
if you wait
till grief’s red/black dulls
to the ache of a bad dream
years and years down the line
in the meantime
I am here with the bees
ISBN: 978-1-915877-07-9 | Pages: 80 | Year published: 2026
The Thirteenth Moon explores the interplay between the world and the mind, between silence and voice. Heimlich and unheimlich. Climate change, war, personal loss, ageing — what seemed to be permanent now feels transitory, like the different phases of the moon. The poems in this collection reflect the poet’s belief that it is through the power of creation, the power of our art, that we can navigate a way to live in the present.
This title is a pre-order and won’t be posted until April 21st.
Isbn: 978-1-907682-81-0 | Pages: 72 | Published: 2021
Moyra Donaldson’s Bone House is furious in its range, depth and grief. It is the work of a poet fully alive to the moments of pure light ‘before the darkness closes in again.’
— Kerry Hardie
ISBN: 978-1-907682-68-1 | Pages: 72 | Published: 2019
Drawing on myth, nature and memory, the poems in Carnivorous speak of the extraordinary in the ordinary. Fluidity of self and of time, and evocation of the natural world, our human need to try to make sense of our lives are themes that are expanded and developed in the poet’s eighth collection.