Moyra Donaldson

I don’t recall if I saw my first gunman in my childhood nightmares or on my childhood streets. There were plenty in both and they looked very much like each other. So begins Reggie Chamberlain-King’s introduction to The Black Dreams, a thrilling and compelling collection of specially commissioned stories that explore the emotional geography of growing up and living in Northern Ireland. The fourteen stories gathered here criss-cross coast, border and city as they map a ‘strange’ territory of in-between states and unstable realities in which understanding is unreliable. Obsessions, death and rebirth, violence, sexuality, retribution and apocalypse are all part of the rich fabric of The Black Dreams. Bringing together some of Northern Ireland’s finest writers, along with some of the best new talents, The Black Dreams celebrates and extends the rich tradition of the weird, surreal and dream-like in Northern Irish writing. It is also a powerful act of imagining and storytelling – a vibrant, vivid and exhilarating exploration of a world we cannot, or choose not, to see. Contributors: Jo Baker, Jan Carson, Reggie Chamberlain-King, Aislínn Clarke, Emma Devlin, Moyra Donaldson, Michelle Gallen, Carlo Gébler, John Patrick Higgins, Ian McDonald, Gerard McKeown, Bernie McGill, Ian Sansom, Sam Thompson

Moyra Donaldson is one of Ireland's leading poets. She has published five previous collections, including a Selected Poems in 2013. Her work has been hailed as ‘urbane, modern, and sophisticated…important and engaging…ambitious in its scope, and speaking with a rare authority…insightful and profoundly moving…' Whatever the subject matter –be it anatomy, death, life, sex, or the natural world - Moyra 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.

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.