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.

Three blue figures bent over a frame
coffee on the stove
and repairing
…………………..snip
repairing
…………….snip

Heavy shears clatter on the table.

Evenings on the sofa
three old women
in the shapeshifting beam of the telly
poking strands of cloth through a net
to make familiar the stone cold hearth,
rags made from dresses and towels
from sheets and aprons
rags stripped and ripped
from shoulders and hips
far too soon

    electric bars
    and a relief of heaped plastic coals
    through which flames rise
    always in the same measure
    kindled and consuming
    then waning
    so other fires can spring up
    always in the same measure

These three blue figures clearly look towards the three Moirai or goddesses of fate in Greek mythology, though I don’t think you need to know that to make sense of the poem. I don’t know how the lines would sound in Dugdale’s voice, but as they fall on my inner ear they’re given a solemn, foreboding tread by their frequent clustering of heavy stresses: ‘Morning light crazed like a delft tile’, ‘three blue figures’, ‘Heavy shears clatter’ and so on. In a more elusive way, the sheer, hard definiteness of the sounds seems to hold the images at a distance, giving them a kind of numinous weight, a feeling that what’s being evoked isn’t something localized and incidental but something solemnly ordained the enactment of a ritual, as if to represent a fundamental feature of existence. This impression is strengthened by other elements of patterning – hints of archaic or heightened syntax throughout and the repeated line in the italicised paragraph. However, it’s modified by an opposing pull towards the mundane and temporal. This comes above all, I think, from the words ‘telly’ and ‘poking’, the one bringing a touch of slangy familiarity, the other making the women seem clumsy-fingered and short-sighted. One of the fine things about the passage is the way it brings these opposing impressions together, making the fateful and numinous shine through the mundane and transient or be shone through by it, most vividly in the phrase ‘in the shapeshifting beam of the telly’, where the line’s beginning brings a flood of associations with folktale and myth and its end earths us in the familiar world.

There’s a strong rhythmic coherence to the whole passage. However, separating words and phrases, focusing attention on their individual resonances, cadences and associations, the very slow, emphatic tread that creates this overall rhythmic coherence also emphasises how much rhythmic variety it includes. In fact for me one of the main delights of the passage is simply feeling this variety and how it gives changing body to the changing images, feeling, for example, how after the suspended images, thinner, softer sounds and drifting pauses of

Three blue figures bent over a frame
coffee on the stove
and repairing
…………………..snip
repairing
…………….snip

the thudding abruptness of ‘Heavy shears clatter on the table’ evokes the way my tailor father-in-law’s heavy iron scissors would bang down on a table.

This kind of immediate physical pleasure forms a solid core around which more elusively shifting suggestions move into and out of focus. Individual words and phrases seem surrounded by space within which reflections and associations unfold. Readers of Greek mythology, for example, making the association between these three blue figures and the Greek goddesses of fate, will hear a suggestion of the finality of death in ‘heavy shears clatter on the table’: Atropos, ‘She Who May not Be  Turned’, is the fate who cuts the thread of a life to end it. But different readers will find different suggestions and associations coming into play. These are so many and their interplay is so delicate that singling out individual strands may seem crass, but describing my own associations, in a roughly contemporary context the picture of the three old women in the beam of the telly suggested refugees or settlers trying to settle in someone else’s ruined or abandoned home; field hospital nurses improvising wound bandages; and the stripping of the dead. In a more allegorical way, I thought of the three stages of life – the newborn moving into a world abandoned by previous generations, being clothed in the appurtenances of adult life, then being stripped of it all in death. The net made me think of the net of consequence in which Agamemnon and others are trapped in Aischylos’s play. The flames ‘kindled and consuming / then waning / so other fires can spring up’ made me think of the succession of generations, bringing to mind lines in Alice Oswald’s Memorial,

Like leaves who could write a history of leaves
The wind blows their ghosts to the ground
And the spring breathes new life into the woods
Thousands of names thousands of leaves

Even as I type this, though, I feel the living ideas freeze between the cold paws of analysis. A closer approach to sharing responses to such vital poetry would be joint reading and face to face discussion.