Would it be reasonable to say there is quite a dramatic shift in the form and structure you are using in this new work?
As a writer, I certainly want to develop my work and I don’t want to just write in the same way about the same things all the time.
When I look back over my collections I see a change in my voice over time. In this collection there has been a reasonably dramatic change, perhaps because that as you get older you lose any fear you might have had about saying the things you want to say.
You want to be more direct, more succinct, and so there are many shorter poems in this collection. I would also say you get to a point where you feel you don’t need to dress up your work in any way.
The “Crone” section really doesn’t appear to take any prisoners?
“Crone” came to me as a character, a persona who insisted on having her say and I just went along with that. “Crone” is a very pejorative word so in some ways I was trying to reclaim that word. Within that, there was a sense that quite often people are searching after the next young voice to listen to and older voices get left behind and forgotten about. I felt that here was a “Crone’s” voice and I was going to put it out there into the world.
I think that while there is a very direct, sometimes dark voice in “Crone”, there is a lot of humour in it as well, or at least I hope people will see the humour in the work. It’s not all deadly serious but again you just don’t hear older women’s voices very often so I’m conscious of that situation as well.
How have people responded?
I have found, so far, that many women have enjoyed that section of the collection, actually they have enjoyed the whole collection, but that section seems to resonate especially with women.
I sense a bit of a gender divide in the response to Crone. A couple of men have told me that they find the character quite frightening and that they wouldn’t want to meet her!
Did you expect that response?
I’m not sure what I expected, but a friend of mine from Dublin used some of the “Crone” poems in a poetry workshop, a workshop for women, and I was able to see some of the work which came out of that workshop. The responses were really great because it seemed as if the “Crone” character had given these women permission to put forward their deepest, perhaps often hidden, feelings. I am very happy about contributing to that kind of response.
So follow up the work of Moyra Donaldson go to the following links
www.doirepress.com/writers/moyra-donaldson
humag.co/features/moyra-donaldson-interviewed-by-damian-smyth
