AUDIO READING FROM THE COLLECTION: SNAKESKIN STILETTOS

Confident in tone and technique, the collection’s imaginative explorations rest in an assured eye for details and an ear finely cocked for the everyday and the mundane.

With a sensibility firmly grounded in the present yet alert to the urgencies of the past and future, Donaldson’s poems are urbane and sophisticate, determined to challenge and engage the reader: whether investigations of home and family, the fidelities and betrayals of love, the liberations of the fantastical, the bindings of myth and history, or the unsettling ghosts of the past, the poems in Snakeskin Stilettos are brave, witty and unafraid.

Snakeskin Stilettos

Eight years old you understand

these shoes are different.

Not for nothing

has your mother wrapped them in paper,

shut them into their box, set them

at the very back of the wardrobe.

Forbidden.

You imagine them –

on their own in the dark,

hissing softly.

Biding their time.

Sneak in, creak open the door,

lift the lid and let them out,

untissue the fear.

Run your fingers

against the fissley scales,

press the fangs of heels

into your palm.

Something

you’ve never felt before.

These shoes are live and dangerous.