Sasha Dugdale wrote the opening sequence of this collection during a stay at the family estate of Aleksandr Pushkin, on the border between Russia and Latvia. According to legend, in the winter of 1825 Pushkin set out from his estate to visit friends in St Petersburg, but when a hare ran across his horse's path he took it as a poor omen and returned home. His friends, meanwhile, took part in the Decembrist uprising and were exiled or executed. Dugdale's poems - written sometimes in Pushkin's voice, sometimes in her own - investigate the legend, and her collection goes on to explore the small, crucial moments in people's lives that unwittingly shape their futures. There is a plainness to Dugdale's poetry that feels oddly flattening on first reading. Her language is unvarnished, and her structures simple. But what seems deadening in a single poem becomes beguiling as the poems accumulate. By limiting herself to fundamental nouns - knives, pails, snow, hearts, ice - Dugdale creates a spare, mythical tone that fits itself perfectly to the elemental Russian landscape in which much of her collection is set.