Joy
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About this ebook
Sasha Dugdale
Sasha Dugdale is a poet, writer and translator. She has published five collections of poems with Carcanet Press, most recently Deformations in 2020. She won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2016 and in 2017 she was awarded a Cholmondeley Prize for Poetry. She is former editor of Modern Poetry in Translation and is poet-in-residence at St John’s College, Cambridge (2018-2021).
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Joy - Sasha Dugdale
for Paul
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Joy
The Widow and the Kaleidoscope
The Ballad of Mabel
Valentine’s
‘Tonight I thought of you…’
‘Do you remember how we chanced upon a home…’
Villanelle
The Canoe
Cutting Apples
Ironing the Spider
The Ballad of the Sewing Kit
Pfingsten in Paterki
How my friend went to look for her roots
Mappa Mundi
Kittiwake
Days
The Daughter of a Widow
For Edward Thomas
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Sasha Dugdale
Copyright
Joy
A dark stage. A woman in a rocking chair. Catherine Blake.
Silence.
They don’t want me here… they don’t want me…
An old woman, getting in their way,
under their feet.
Look what the cat brought in. An ancient orphan, no future to bless her.
A sparrow, a spider, a nothing.
Good for nothing. And nothing will come of nothing… And nothing will come of me now… A nothing left in darkness…
This is how it is. This is how it has been always. A parting.
We are parted
The fibres of our souls are spread. They cling –
A tear. A tear. And a tearing.
I am a rent shirt… I am a poor man’s shirt and a pair of woollen stockings and a patched jacket thrown from the hearse… Every breeze shudders me… And no one wants me…
How I ache… How I ache… How I ache…
Nine days I laboured, nine days and nights I laboured, and on the tenth he gave me my freedom, singing. And my freedom was a wicker basket for the husks of shells. My freedom was a quilt of unspoken words…
looks around
A foreign kitchen, a winter light.
Seagulls very high in the clouds. How I ache.
A foreign hearth in London. My freedom is someone else’s hearth in his town. The tenth day is drawing to a close. How I ache.
And he is gone, fled singing to some place I cannot reach. His angels came and he sang to them and they told him they needed him more than I did… Merciless, merciless angels… Merciless angels who know nothing of human despair. And he went with them. He nodded and spoke mild words and was soon gone… And he left a shadow of grime on his collar and a warm bed. And the angels had tall wings, like steeples, or like sails and spread white like the King’s ship in dock, and they took him, only I couldn’t see them, but I know how they looked, for hadn’t he