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.

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The poems in Hasan Alizadeh’s House Arrest are translated and introduced by Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould. What I got out of them was above all streams of vivid and expressive images. Like Fan in The Ink Cloud Reader, Alizadeh weaves together strands from different cultural traditions. Some of his poems relate to Iranian public life, some to the Old and New Testaments or Greek and Roman mythology, some apparently to the personal experience of the poet himself. The introduction tells us that he started as a short story writer. His poems usually do involve story but their … Continue Reading