A Very European Myth
Fiona Sampson reviews The Estate by Sasha Dugdale

Sasha Dugdale’s debut, Notebook, was a profoundly pleasurable and – paradoxically – mature exploration of often-European themes and dictions.  This was no surprise: Dugdale is a fine translator of Russian poetry and drama, who initiated the Royal Court’s Russian New Writing project.   Her second collection continues and deepens this work.  The concerns of The Estate include travel, place and the complex influences of cultures upon each other: from the Green Man who haunts mediaeval English culture to the classical stories of Dido and Achilles, by way of Spanish Republicanism and string quartet practice.  It is characterised from the outset by the title sequence of eleven poems, written from Pushkin’s family estate of Mikhailovskoye, with which it opens. 

If these are, conspicuously, tropes from what we have come to think of as high, rather than popular, culture: that too serves to set Dugdale apart as a European, rather than merely a British, writer.  The Estate often employs touchingly old-fashioned phrasing – ‘Flower of your mother’s eye /When you first took flowers from him” (‘Carnation, Bible’) – and sentiments: “I could not sit alone in a house of our making” (‘The Casting’); “winter slinks about /Tight-belted and down-at-heel” (‘The Coat’).  The effect is not unlike that of a sepia print.  Not weakened or prettified, but resolutely displaying its own unfashionable delicacy, her verse offers us a portrait of a sensibility. 

Sometimes this is clearly that of a woman, writing in dialogue with other women.  ‘From the Window’, which opposes literary consolations to traditional feminine labour, covers ground similar to that of Eavan Boland’s famous ‘Achill Woman’; ‘An Education’ has echoes of U.A.Fanthorpe; there are versions of Anna Akhmatova – and indeed of work by the great British painter Gwen John.  But Dugdale’s is never a special pleading; rather, she steps up to the writer’s responsibilities – as a woman.   Literary inventions, she points out, can betray the real, brutalised experience a ‘Poet’ claims to draw on:

Her work is influenced by folk music from her native region.
Her work is influenced by village women singing,
Or giving birth, crouching in the pastures.

As this irony suggests, the sensibility The Estate reveals is intelligent and wry – as well as highly original.   The title sequence explores both personal and socio-political unease in a cluster of scenes from 1825 Mikhailovskoye. Dugdale enlarges the legend that Pushkin was deterred by the omen of a hare, running across his path, from joining friends who took part in the failed Decembrist uprising.  The flight of ‘The Hare’ becomes almost mythic: “The way it leapt along /As if the ground was several miles below /As if it grasped the air in every paw”; and this is necessary in order for us to grasp that there are “Points like this in everyone’s life. /Metaphorical hares, virtual black cats” (‘Hare’s Breadth’).  On the next page, ‘The Rope’ is a sophisticated riff on the unsophisticated game of Hangman, as Pushkin grapples with survivor’s guilt; and the sequence closes with a fine, and very Russian, villanelle.

Perhaps Sasha Dugdale’s finest achievements in this book, though, are two extraordinary poems in which grief powers both language and imagination. ‘Lot’s Wife’, utterly removed from Carol-Ann Duffy’s jokey The World’s Wife, vividly inhabits the dilemma of the self-denial, the self-erasure, which Abrahamic religions demand of the “good” woman: who will be loved only by recipients of charity,  “people on the brink /of disaster”.  And ‘Pskov Wedding (1941-1944)’, which turns inside out T.S.Eliot’s circle-dance of the generations in ‘East Coker’, is a stunning lament for the lost millions of history:

A slight bride, in her own weight of satin and gold
Standing like a spindle between earth and sky
And a photographer who turns, aims through the crowd –

And mocks them gravely,
                                        is this a funeral I see?