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?