Summer 2008

Loud is the New Quiet

Kathryn Morris contrasts poets with different attitudes to restraint.


Sasha Dugdale is well known as a translator. So the arrival of her second collection, The Estate, is a pleasant reminder that she is also an accomplished poet. The first eleven or so poems are inspired by her visits to the Pushkin family estate. Many revolve around a popular legend. In 1825 Pushkin set out to visit friends in St Petersburg, but when a hare - a sign of bad luck - crossed his path, he turned back, thus avoiding the Decembrist revolution and the fate of friends who were sentenced to death, hard labour, or exile.

Dugdale views this story obsessively, examining it from every angle. The opening poem is an almost imperceptible sonnet narrated from the point of view of the hare. He's a knowing hare, with human thoughts, and he predicts, correctly, that he'll change Pushkin's fate by jumping out from under his bush. The second poem (which has an echo of Frost's 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' in sound and form) is narrated by Pushkin himself, who describes turning his horse around in the snow after spotting the hare and its little tracks. Whereas Frost and his horse move towards death ('miles to go before I sleep'), Pushkin does the opposite, declaring, 'I cannot cross this line.' In the third poem, an omniscient narrator comments on fate and the human condition, saying, 'We must do what we must do'.


The eight poems that follow depart from the hare and concentrate instead on the Pushkin estate itself: objects such as a footstool belonging to his lover, or a lake. Like an actor, Dugdale gets into the minds of her speakers. One can hear the translator in her, sensitive to the music of the past, creating a language that can feel a little foreign. Her poems are dignified, contemporary, but at the same time quirkily old-fashioned. The collection is full of sneaky sonnets, quiet end-rhymes and assonances, and tidy stanzas. Yet she has the ability to depart from these habits, as in an idiosyncratic villanelle that lacks repeating lines. Still other poems sprawl about the page with muffled wildness. Her music can be strange and ecstatic, with thrilling line breaks, as in:

No man is an island. No,
No man could seem this remote

The only difficulty in this book may, however, be this intractably formal voice. The primness suits the early poems about Pushkin and dramatic monologues such as 'Lot's Wife': 'I put everything into a grain sack / And fled. "Because we are righteous, he said." // But oh, I would have preferred to be beautiful.' It seems out of place in later poems about contemporary life and her children. She keeps the reader at arm;s length in poems that have the potential to be intimate and immediate. Dugdale is at her best when she merges the narrative with the lyric, as in the poem 'Motherlove', which describes a conversation about death with her small son. Despite the reticence of the voice, the poem is deeply poignant, beginning with the son who points outside his window and asks if 'they' will die. We don't quite know who 'they' are, but he seems to mean 'everyone and everything'. The mother assures her son they won't die. So she's lied - and she knows she's lied. But at the same time she believes she hasn't lied; she has wishfully decided she will not let death happen.

Dugdale's work is thematically contained, and yet expansive. There is prehistory at one extreme and cosmological speculation at the other; there is Pushkin, and there is daily life. Poems are perhaps too often praised for their quietness. It's natural to desire loud poems too and loud poems seem comparatively rare these days and in this country. But Dugdale's quietness is different. She is like the shyest girl in school who is also the cleverest. One can only hope her intelligence will win out over the modesty of her poems, because she is a poet of great potential, who deserves notice as more than a translator.