Red House by Sasha Dugdale
Carcanet Poetry (ebook), 2011
80 Pages
I borrowed this ebook from my library and read it on my Kobo.
BLURB
In Red House, her third collection, Sasha Dugdale evokes the ghosts and presences that flit about on the margins of our lives. She finds them at the edge of towns where superstores and allotments blur an older landscape, in Europe where emigrants leave their gods, their neighbours, their memories ‘jettisoned like old clothes'; and across the chalk Downs of her native Sussex. She traces the shapes that they leave through folk song, lament and lyric poetry.
Haunted by history, confronted by primal brutalities, the poems in Red House proclaim the fierce, bright authenticity that is ‘all the proof we need that we’re alive’.
EXTRACT
Maldon
And there on the coast like a Chinese lantern hung the sun.
Whatever you do, you should not let them pour off the half-island
to mix with the birds and the silts, and the wise woman.
REVIEW
I’ve never heard of Sasha Dugdale before. The name doesn’t ring a bell anyway. I chose to read this collection because I liked the front cover. I also liked the title of the collection.
really enjoyed this collection of poems. Dugdale’s poems are beautifully written, full of lovely imagery. The poems in Red House are the kind of poems I find a bit intimidating. They’re proper poems. By that I mean I can’t describe what they’re about in a few lines. The title poem is really quite long and offers a fine example of the type of poetry to be found in this collection.
RATING
