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 of an Abduction’ – we see the special kind of breadth this gives: a rain of vivid glimpses of domestic life, domestic violence, war, flight, seduction, abduction, rape, sometimes in nineteenth, twentieth or twenty-first century incarnations, sometimes in a Homeric one, sometimes hovering between, as when a soldier sent to collect a girl – perhaps  Helen of Troy, perhaps a modern trafficking victim – drives past bullet-holed road signs but carries a bow. Breadth, then, is partly a matter of historical range, partly a matter of emotional variety. The poet moves us from scene to scene with a speed that I would call dazzling except that the scenes we move between are so solidly and clearly established in themselves. This combination of speed and clarity depends on the vivid economy of Dugdale’s images and the sureness of her rhythms. What makes it moving is the quiet empathy with which she presents many of her characters, and the way humble lives, sometimes caught in devastating circumstances, are given weight by the epic context and style of various sections.

The impression of breadth and scale also comes from Dugdale’s virtuoso handling of different forms. There are fourteen numbered sections, varying in length from one to nineteen pages. Most are in verse, sometimes rhyming, sometimes not, but II, IV and VII are short drama scripts in prose with stage directions. II – titled ‘In the Rehearsal Room’ – is a brilliantly comic dramatic monologue, spoken by a patronisingly self-satisfied theatre director presumably putting on a play about Troy. VII, a stage or screen passage in which Helen tells her dreams to a bored, then jealous Paris, is equally funny. It’s more haunting than II, though, because other tones are interwoven with the satire, glimmers of wistful yearning and (this being a dialogue, not a monologue) a frustrated desire for communication on Helen’s part. This section, in other words, is much more layered than the second. For readers of ancient Greek literature, there’s even an apparent allusion to one of the most poignant moments in Pindar’s victory odes.

Dugdale works by presentation, by showing, not telling, in the old phrase, letting us arrive at our own responses to the images and scenes she conjures. Her approach to imagery is itself highly varied. Her pictures are often powerful in a literal way, vividly presenting a situation that’s significant in itself and seems to represent some kind of archetype of human experience or behaviour:

She’s told not to open the door
so she huddles, draws her furred hood tighter
the chill of leatherette under her thighs
smell of petrol from jerrycans

They can create metaphors as startling as this comparison of the gods to dogs:

gods weave around each other
barely touching
sniffing one another’s genitalia
saying nothing

Or they can plunge us into surreal fantasy:

Death came to the plain and perched in a tree 

She wore a riding habit with puffed sleeves
Her shoulder blades were a pattern of kohl-ringed eyes

It seems clear to me that The Strongbox is a major work that will repay endless revisiting. Line by line, phrase by phrase, word by word, the writing ripples with invitations to reflection. With rereading, as well as thinking more deeply about the major structural continuities, one starts to absorb multiple tiny echoes that are themselves fresh triggers for thought, like the echo between the description of Death in the last section I’ve quoted and the description of someone who may be Helen or may be a modern, trafficked prostitute ‘bawling her eyes out, kohl / marking her cheeks’ in section one.

Here’s a link to a more detailed discussion of the opening that I posted shortly before writing this review.

Sasha Dugdale, The Strongbox, 88 pp, £12.99, Carcanet Poetry

I would like to thank Peter and Ann Sansom and Holly Hopkins for their permission to post this review, which appeared in the North issue 71.