“Deformations” – Sasha Dugdale

I am beginning to suffer from TS Eliot shortlist fatigue – do you know the signs? that heartsinking feeling when you open a much-heralded collection, hyped to the skies in a blurb on the back, and think to yourself on reading the first poems “WTF? I don’t understand a word of this”. At the same time as I admire the stamina of judges who have to wade through a mountain of books, and who then produce a shortlist of astonishing diversity, I find myself thinking of their role as gatekeepers…but that is for another time.

In common with the other shortlisted collections, the brain-fog that overcame me on starting Sasha Dugdale’s book gradually lifted on a second and third reading, although it remained, thick and heavy on occasions:

"Why do perpetual motion machines never work?
Because history only travels in one direction."

Now I know that poetry needs to be elliptical to be interesting, and I know that these lines are quotes from something (it’s slightly unclear from the footnote what is a quote from what), but as elliptical non-sequiturs go this is a good example. It doesn’t help a poet when the reader is shouting “No!” at the page.

The collection consists of three parts. First is a sequence called Welfare Handbook which, the Notes tell us, uses material from the writings of letter cutter and artist Eric Gill, his diaries and notes, as well as reflections on his life, his sexual experimentation and the abuse of his daughters. Last is another sequence, called Pitysad, which consists of poems composed round themes and fragments from the Odyssey. Between them a group of poems on miscellaneous themes, incorporating different voices, ranging from a moneychanger’s female assistant in the Temple of Jerusalem to a present-day woman walking her dogs on the South Downs with a son or daughter who is on the verge of adulthood.

Of the three, I found Welfare Handbook the most uneven. The difficulty with any exercise of this kind is that the writer, deep in their subject after prolonged research, has to build a bridge to the reader with minimal knowledge. My own knowledge of Eric Gill stems, most recently, from reading Elizabeth Taylor’s The Wedding Group, which satirises the artist’s establishment. There, Gill is portrayed as a spoilt autocrat, head of a hide-away Arts and Crafts community – not a complete picture. In Welfare Handbook The first poem begins:

"A female peacock would be a monstrosity
what shape would it assume? How hard it is
to envisage a building that goes up and up."

This is one of those WTF moments. Call me tendentious, but my reaction to the first line was “It’s a peahen, dummy”. Then a transition from a female peacock to a building. Mmm.

More successful are the incursions into Gill’s sex life. “sex with children upsets us/more than it used to. As my friend’s mother/once pointed out: stay away from him/you know what he’s like.” The double standards become increasingly sinister: “If he entered you and it hurt then it was done/gently, with the best intentions”. And then:

                                         "the mystery of the shift
diaphanous and yet chaste, the plaits, oh
the mystery of hair and the mystery (for some)
of why two sisters might have begged the youngest
to marry without delay, to do secretarial, to become
a governess, or to drown herself perhaps,
when they left home with their husbands."

I like the mix of registers in this passage – the poetic “diaphanous and yet chaste” followed by the down-to-earth “to do secretarial” echoes the contrast between the fantasy and the urgency of the reality. The horror is all the stronger for being so understated.

By contrast the later sequence, Pitysad, had me gripped from the start:

“Odysseus spent the day with the couple in their apartment, an unplastered room many floors up. There were no seats and no tables, but a smell of cooking hung in the air.”

Yes, I thought. I know where I am: this is the territory of Greek myth anachronism, started off by Cocteau. When Penelope bids her husband farewell:

"That day she climbed back into her car
and slammed the door against the wind
it was warm and drowsy at the wheel
still smelt of his deodorant

and beneath her in the bay
the ships fanned out into a wedge
of white-sailed cranes
silently, as she sucked a mint imperial..."

I was captivated and convinced by these poems from the start. The central character, Pitysad (I remain baffled by the choice of name, finding it unhelpful), is pictured in a variety of places, all chronology confused. Scenarios vary from the sacking of Troy to a clinic for treatment of an undefined disease that could be PTSD. Shades of the Eric Gill poems continue with the seduction of a young girl in a municipal carpark in a warzone. In contrast with the cruelty of war we have glimpses of Penelope at home. In the Odyssey Penelope is pursued by suitors whom she resists. In the Dugdale version of events the suitors are lovers, who seek favours from her after the affair is ended. But she conducts the affair from a distance:

                               "...better
not to be steeled, better to fool oneself
that this is pleasure of mercy

or the need to survive."

These poems have immense power. The varying forms adopted enhance the feeling of fragments, discovered snapshots that echo the damage caused to both parties – the wartorn veteran as much as the abandoned wife. The last piece in the sequence is a prose poem stretching over almost two pages without punctuation, which clarifies what Dugdale is doing. It is in Penelope’s voice.

“I feel his body next to mine behind me yes I feel it he is placing his human hands around me around the scalding heat of me he places them on my breasts and yes I’d brush away all the hero all the myth I’d chip and plane away at the lying outer form of him to expose the worthless soul inside yes worthless and if he could only hear it I would take that insignificant thing and I would love it with all my own insignificance I’m insignificant but I’ve kept going I’m insignificant but I am not a myth I am an existence and I am so full of love”

The poems in the central section are varied in form and content and – for this reader at any rate – also in success. Golden Age describes the idyllic childhood of a person of great potential whom the poet encounters in later life as his translator to find him querulous about his wife and his failure to win “that prize/he was promised all those years ago”. I mentioned above The Last Day of Your Childhood, which describes in masterful fashion the way in which the mind works, and the way in which – an English characteristic – emotions are kept below the surface. Odysseus Welcomed from the Sea by Nausicaa is in the voice of a teenage girl caught between repulsion and a magnetic attraction.

I hope you get the message – that this is not a collection for the fainthearted, but that it rewards persistence in spades. If there are quibbles, blame lockdown, TS Eliot prize fatigue, the weather or whatever you like. They are minor in the context of the whole.

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Sasha Dugdale’s “Deformations” is published by Carcanet.