Even on a quick initial reading, The Strongbox by Sasha Dugdale will take the reader’s imagination in many different directions and offer immediate pleasures of many kinds.

First, it works on a remarkably broad canvas. Drawing on the myth of Troy and related ancient Greek material, it’s epic in scale and effect in a way that develops from the work of Ezra Pound and other Modernist poets. Fragmenting the ancient Troy story, Dugdale rewrites incidents from it in anachronistic ways and mashes them up with incidents from other stories in a range of scenarios. Already in the first section – ‘Anatomy … Continue Reading

I’m going to be reviewing Sasha Dugdale’s The Strongbox and a couple of other books for The North. There won’t be space for close reading in the review, so I thought I’d say a few things here.

It’s such a vividly written book, so alive with shifting images, suggestions and associations, that as I read I keep wanting to pause, to pin down the impressions it sets fizzing in my mind. For now I’ll just make a couple of brief points about how styles, scenes and resonances are interwoven on its first page.

Morning light, crazed like a delft tile.

… Continue Reading