On the road
SASHA DUGDALE is already well known as a translator of Russian drama and poetry. Notebook, her first collection of poems, is preoccupied with the role of the observer, both as a privilege and a plight, and draws naturally on Russian antecedents. The opening poem, "Wide Glass Sky", begins with a crisply observed street scene: "An old street of barrels and baths / And long grey pipes in the sand. / Wind, wind, but no white snow — / Dust, and two old men clinking bags / And a woman staring from a window". The subsequent disavowal — "This is not mine, this world / These feelings have been stolen" — is surprising and troubling, and much of the book shares the sense of walking on eggshells through a world which is simultaneously absorbing and alien.
In Dugdale's imagination, everywhere is Abroad. The spare narrative of "Cheese Club" explores the beachhead which an exile must attempt to establish in the host society: "His opponent smells of England. / It reeks from his every pore, / This salty little island" and the newcomer must learn as it were to play again in the face of bizarre indigenous hostility and the failure of experience to cohere. Whether coherence has been lost or never existed is hard to tell, but "Chalk and Cheese", where the poet contemplates images from family life, seems to disbelieve that lives amount to meaning, "Will they sum us up in verses or will they say, / As we feel ourselves to be, they were all chalk and cheese. / They were all contradiction and fear. They made no sense".
Making sense may be a matter of particular moments of love, loss or intense aesthetic perception, rather than passages of history. There is something close to desperation in "The Pear", which identifies the gift of a pear with the rising of the sun as a form of free celebration of life, in the controlled conditions of a car journey:
But the pear is round and sweet and all the way home
The sun is melting air and growing in the sky
And biting into pear the day is there for sure
And the juices trickle down and the pear is flame inside.
Imagination seems almost to snatch at the moment for fear it will be spirited away. A kindred anxiety, gathered around the point of observation, emerges in another road poem, "Lightning", but here the act of attention short-circuits the movement towards freedom, weaving a net of associations around parenthood, love, sex and transformation, leaving "the nervous system shot through in light".
While Dugdale often favours a spry, sinewy free verse, she is equally drawn to more overtly musical forms, as in the incantatory lament, "Rootless": "Rootless, and seeing things are so, / Let the piece of driftwood go. // Take your moisture from the air / And salt from licking skin and hair / It may never be the same: / Moving, moving on again". This is not a note often struck in contemporary English, and while there are also unsuccessful examples — occasional rhythms that seem glib or gauche rather than apt — Dugdale is doing one of the hardest things for a poet, staking out an individual terrain. Where many writers would use heavily signed or insistently located materials to do this, she seems to prefer an unadorned language which requires her to be truthful to rich and contradictory areas of feeling. It makes for a beguiling and unusual debut, its best poems at once elusive, satisfying and likely to go on being read.
Notebook, Sasha Dugdale, Carcanet, paperback, p.69, £7.95. 1 903039 67 3
© The Times Literary Supplement
SEAN O'BRIEN
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