Red House

Sasha Dugdale

• Publisher: Oxford Poets
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781906188023
• eBook ISBN: 9781847779434
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

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'.

Red House

The red house lies without the parish of the soul.

The frozen trees, the swings in the grey yard, the slow sweeping fans

Of brushes in light snow, and how that bus stops every day

Just beyond the red house and picks up.

Stay or leave? There is no addressing the Lord

For we are plain beyond that, but isn’t that white round a hole

In the sky where he once sat? Many of the shadows

Look up in their sickness, point with their aimless guns

And spout aimless rounds, and now one may hit

And one piece of bright shot will slip into that winter sun

And tear it, so that tomorrow it limps and spits sunset

All bleeding day. Red house, red house, forgive us such trespasses

For aren’t we the twice blessed, having lived through stranger weather

And having known you, red house?

*

Starlings in the loft and eaves of the red house

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

By the day-sick and the unfit for work. There was a golden age

For sure: there is always a golden age, like a shower of gold

Sweeter at a distance, perpendicular to the beloved body

Siring leaden times and leaden rivers. Now the madman,

Calling out of his window, denounces his long-dead neighbours,

The starlings pass him off, stuttering, the starlings passing through –

How birdcalls make sense of sorrow and suffering

Which is subject to hyper-inflation and loses its own mortal currency

In numbers. Red house, I see you in the city, on the plain

By the roadside and the railway. You are never in the mountains

Or by the sea. The smell of you is homely and nauseating

Like the smell of all humankind.

*

There was a woman who left the red house with her baby.

Her own mother waved from the window, a taxi took them away,

Daughter and granddaughter and then they were gone.

The woman dreamt at night of the red house:

The gaping letterboxes; the stink of tobacco and piss

Which fits so snugly, like a baby’s bonnet;

Her own footsteps climbing the stairwell ahead of her;

The tender annoyance of a wasp trapped on a landing.

Her mother stood with dumbbells in the kitchen

Swinging her hips this way and that, swinging her eyes

This way and that, wishing they were real bells she held

To clash and peal about her in a passion:

For never in all her great maternal struggling

Had she once considered such a silence.

*

Once a man brought home a bear to the red house.

A zoo-bear, still a cub, and muzzled and harnessed.

The children were kept inside as it played. The man smoked

And twitched the reins, and ground cigarettes under his heel.

The bear snuffled under the bench and grubbed up shit and sweetwrappers.

The bear’s sojourn was a gift of sorts, for the man was a romantic

And hoped his girl would relent when she saw the creature

And bring them milk in a saucer and titbits, and humanwarmth.

Until she let him in he would sleep on the landing with the bear

And teach him to dance on his hind legs, up the steps and down

In an endless manbeast cha-cha, paws clattering, feet slapping

His humming summoning succour from the stairwell.

The bear they took on the third day; it went well enough back into the light.

The man threw himself from the window, and he was lamed for life.

*

All the world is beyond the padded door of the flat.

A man once followed a girl into the red house and caught her on the stairs.

He held...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• Maldon
• Red House
• ‘Perhaps Akhmatova was right’
• Ten Moons
• The Poetry of Earth
• Michael Blann
• A Ballad without Rhyme
• Dawn Chorus
• Fish’s Dream
• ‘Lifting the bedcovers and there’
• Out of Town
• Amazing Grace
• Plainer Sailing (Alzheimer’s)
• ‘I can only be who I am’
• Moor
• Prince’s
• Doggy Life
• On Beauty
• Asylum
• Song of the Seagull
• Shepherds
• All Souls’
• Annunciation
• The Alphabet of Emigration
• Agora
• Sweet Companions
• Laughter
• Wolstonbury
• ‘Late winter, like the tide retreating’
• Blessing
• About the Author
• Also by Sasha Dugdale from Carcanet / OxfordPoets
• Copyright