Rising to Poetry

Sasha Dugdale's second collection, The Estate, is by comparison with Bird's a sustained achievement: there are poems here that startle you into respect. Frequently there is an intimacy of touch, a hushed intensity that makes one hold one's breath. The first eleven poems form a loose sequence based on the life of Pushkin. Dugdale tells us they were written during a stay at the Pushkin family estate at Mikhailovskoye. However, any fear of too much literary piety is confounded by the intensity and clarity of the writing. Technically, Dugdale is not perfect - the rhymed poems in particular can be a little awkward in diction - but she makes up for this by her selfless concentration on her subject matter. Her gaze is that of a painter's - indeed, paintings inspire a number of her poems - and the scenes she evokes are closely-observed: there is a sort of 'magical realism' at work.

There is also a curious obliquity. 'The Conscript' is about bullying and racial abuse in the army, but its ending is puzzingly tangential:

The cat we feed with milk from a mess tin
Jumps up on the window, he is empty and spry

There is some material that is memorable here; but in the end it is more memorable for what it says that for the way it says it.