Sasha Dugdale - Red House

Sasha Dugdale, Red House (Carcanet)

I'm not going to hazard a guess at the significance or symbolism of the red house in the title of this collection. It is a series of seven poems in the book and quick internet research suggests it is taken from a painting of 1932 by Kazimir Malevich. In the poems, a variety of vulnerable or dispossessed humanity and animals come and go, there are lines of rare music, like the vowel sounds in,

And the nestlings peep and pip at intervals, heard in rooms throughout

By the day-sick and the unfit for work

and one is aware of elsewheres whether spiritual, emotional or of geographical belonging.

I like poets who can do different things equally well, like Thom Gunn's ability to move between strict metre, syllabics and free verse. If Red House is not easy poetry, it is worth the effort, whereas in the same book, a poem like Prince's, nostalgic for a bygone way of life with the closing of a landmark shop, could hardly be more straightforward and yet is no less satisfying.

In Out of Town, a poem redolent of the waste land of Sean O'Brien and David Harsent's books this year, a derelict world is haunted by spirits, or are we them already, 'where no-man's-land might be an honest place.'

Beauty comes out of dross and horror can lie beneath beauty. In Dawn Chorus,

How they sing: as if each had pecked up a smouldering coal

Their throats singed and swollen with song

In dissonance as befits the dark world

Where only travellers and the sleepless belong

There is plenty more to like and admire. Shepherds, 'Perhaps Akhmatova was right', as well as poems responding to Keats, Auden and others. It is warmer and less desolate than other books this year that have inhabited similar territory and one could have done with more of it. I had thought that my shortlists for this year's best collections and poems were just about settled but I am reminded that it is only October and it isn't over until this gifted lady has sung.