AUDIO READING FROM THE COLLECTION: MARY PATTERSON
Miracle Fruit sees Mora Donaldson re-engaging with lives lived on the margin and, once again, returning to the Enlightenment to investigate constructs of modern femininity.
Whether channelling the voice of Mary Patterson, one of Burke and Hare’s cadavers, the co-joined Violet Hilton reflecting upon her strange and celebrated life or writing about Gizel Steevans of Dublin, the Pig-faced woman, Donaldson’s poems show a remarkable empathy and compassion for her subjects.
Ambitious in its scope, and speaking with a rare authority, the poems of Miracle Fruit are compelling, insightful and profoundly moving.
Mary Patterson
Plied with gin, stupefied,
Burke’s knee on my breast,
Hare’s hand across my breath
til the life is pressed out of me,
then I’m delivered to your door
and it was one thing Dr Knox,
who buys the beef,
to take my body,
for professional
scientific purposes,
for the greater good
so to speak,
and for certain my body
was worth more as dead meat:
I’d hitch up my skirts
for just a few coins
in the shadows of Canongate,
whereas you paid seven pounds
and ten shillings,
but to lay me out like that,
naked on the couch,
sensuously arranged
under the flickering candlelight,
my dead face seductively
turned to the audience,
and a white sheet draped
teasingly over my calves
and then have me sketched
before my dissection
now that’s a disgrace.
What were you thinking?
And you Mr Ferguson, surgeon
in training, looking at me,
in your professional capacity
as I looked at you in mine
just two nights previous.
You still want to use me?