Joy

Sasha Dugdale

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781784105044
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Poesia

Winner of the 2017 Poetry Book Society Winter Choice Award.
Contains the poem 'Joy' - Winner of the 2016 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem.
Sasha Dugdale's fourth Carcanet collection, Joy, features the poem of that title which received the 2016 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. 'Joy' is a monologue in the voice of William Blake's wife Catherine, exploring the creative partnership between the artist and his wife, and the nature of female creativity. The Forward judges called it 'an extraordinarily sustained visionary piece of writing'.
The poems in Joy mark a new departure for Dugdale, who expresses in poetry a hitherto 'silent' dialogue which she began as an editor of Modern Poetry in Translation with writers such as Don Mee Choi, Kim Hyesoon, Maria Stepanova and Svetlana Alexeivich. Dugdale combines an open interest in the historical fate of women and in the treacherous fictional shaping of history. In the abundant, complex and not always easy range of voices in Joy she attempts to redress the linear nature of remembrance and history and restore the 'maligned and misaligned'.

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 spent all his life in their company and mine? And didn’t they sometimes appear in white like good children, and sometimes like ladies but barefoot, with rosy pink staining their necks and hands and ringlets in their hair? Their sighs were angel swords and their smiles were beams of light. He smiled at me, as if to say can’t you see how bonny they are today, on this, my deathday, and there’s the whole pity of it, for I couldn’t see, and I never could.

And then the men took all his possessions and I could have sold the carpenter’s glass and the copper and the pigments for I was wily like that but they said not to worry in my grief and they would provide for me although what was the providing to them when I eat like a bird and I can still keep house and they don’t want me, they don’t want me and they never will want me, no one will want me as he wanted me.

He wanted me. And his want is gone with him. And isn’t that the ordinary way of things? When as a child I saw the widow ladies in their black bonnets following the coffins, didn’t I laugh a little laugh to myself, because nothing so ordinary as a widowing could happen to me, armed with my black hair and black eyes. I walked out on my lover’s walks in Battersea, where the wind from the river comes sweeping in and knocks the black bonnets and tears the handkerchiefs from their hands, those spider ladies creeping along behind their hearse. And I was the wind. The pitiless wind…

Laughs silently

I told him I pitied him! A lie. A lie to feast upon, because no man, no man in London could have pitied him. And he said he would love me

and it was as good as done then, my widowing

sealed to me.

I could have sewn a strip of black to my clothes every single day. Here… And here… and here… (she clutches at her arms and her breasts) and here… because he made my terrible widowing his life’s business.

… Gone. Singing. Will I forgive him that singing… Singing like fruit breaking from its bud. And the bud’s purpose gone!

He made me! He took me, soft and approximate as I was and blew the world into me. He put coals in my mouth and filled my hair with marble dust so I looked as white as one of his angels. But I was not his angel. I am rooted in the earth.

I’m angry.

I’m angry. My anger is an ache.

My lungs are full of howls, howls howling over each other.

What right did you have? You, you of all men, who let the slaves go free from the mill to run singing into the field, and the schoolboy! And the bonds and chains and taskmasters you dissolved into nothing….

And here I am! Your helpmate… your Kate… Bonded to nothing.

How I ache. How I ache.

Pause

These men who offer me charity for your sake, they honoured you and loved you. They took me for your maid when they first came and knocked on the door. And one of them took the bell pull to his mouth and kissed it. Funny young men! They honoured you and you swelled in the veneration, and I loved them then.

I hate them now, taunting me with their limbs and their eyes. They are more of your absence.

The more time they occupy the less you do.

Where are you? Where have you gone?

Husband!

Your death comes and counsels me.

It has a milky voice, it has a broken voice

it folds me in its pale arms and bids me

Think woman! Think of me.

I am suddenness.

I am the noise of cutting cloth so the remnant falls into a shivering heap.

I am colour in reverse and poetry backwards.

I pare away the ugly old past.

I seal every backwater with an iron till the tree of memory is a stump in you.

Put away that likeness in your head, old woman. It will cause more pain. Turn its face to the wall.

Think of me! Don’t think of him.

Pause

How I ache. Oh how I ache

Pause

No. I say. No. Give me my despair.

I wish and feel and weep and while I weep I delight.

I remember everything.

Breathes deep

I remember how you t...