These are two of the most absorbing poetry books I have come across for some while. Much of their material is very dark, and as both rely heavily on collage and multiple viewpoints and narratives, I was expecting a slow, thoughtful read, with many pauses. And yet I found myself transported, buttonholed by a series of narrators as compelling as any Ancient Mariner.

 

Sasha Dugdale has described her ‘ideal poetry’ as ‘exist[ing] in the space between theatre and poetry and sound’ and much of the sheer verve of The Strongbox lies in its extensive use of dramatic form – a monologue from a theatre director set ‘In the rehearsal room’; dialogues between Helen and Menelaus, Helen and Paris; dream monologues from Helen, set in a train station, on a tour coach – interspersed with fast-moving, mostly very short-lined, mostly unpunctuated verse. The story-telling isn’t a smooth linear narration. Instead, it stops and starts, takes sideways leaps (into scene-setting, association-building), hints at its protagonists, doubles back on itself, gives stronger and stronger hints about who is really here in one or another swiftly sketched scenario, all in a sort of breathless rush, nonetheless highly controlled, building energy as it goes.

 

We open with the Fates, in a familiar and unfamiliar scene:

Morning light, crazed like a delft tile.

Three blue figures bent over a frame

coffee on the stove

and repairing

                         snip

repairing

              snip

Heavy shears clatter on the table. (p. 1)

 

The first word in each poem within a section (there are fourteen in all) is marked by a very large initial capital, allowing the poems to be read as a continuous sequence, but with clear markers for individual sub-sections (an equivalent for paragraph markers in prose, perhaps?)  So, for example, the first section, ‘ANATOMY OF AN ABDUCTION’ continues:

 

Evenings on the sofa

three old women

in the shape-shifting beam of the telly

poking strands of cloth through a net

to make familiar the stone cold hearth,

rags made from dresses and towels

from sheets and aprons

rags stripped and ripped

from shoulders and hips

far too soon (p. 1)

 

And ‘far too soon’, the abduction is under way. ‘It began with the sun’ we’re told (p. 2 – as we will discover, this is a prefiguring of Apollo) and then, on the next page, ‘It began on the least good road. (p. 3) And the horribly predictable story unfolds:

 

Even as I rang the number on the slip

I saw little chance of escape

I left a message in the pre-arranged code

ripped the paper to bits (p. 15)

 

This is reminiscent of Moniza Alvi’s Fairoz (2022), a similarly powerful account of a young woman who finds herself inexorably drawn towards a ‘now just him’, to use Dugdale’s arresting phrase for abductors who groom their victims online, isolating them from family and friends (p. 2). But whereas Fairoz finds her way back, escapes extreme trauma, this abductee finds herself exiled to a bombed city, in a basement looking onto a dirty yard with no one for company but a mysterious figure who is at first a bored young man, then an older, toothless one, polishing bow and arrows, a poet: ‘You’re funny,’ the girl says to him. ‘You rhyme.’ (p. 19)

 

Because of course, sliding around at the back of this story, surfacing and disappearing again, are not only the exploits of Helen of Troy but various other Greek gods and heroes: Apollo, Achilles, Hector, Chiron. And among the tales of young women tempted to leave home for uncertain futures,

 

folding air tickets into a travel pouch

and promises of gifts

swatches of wedding silk

a garnet brooch

to bleed out in her spongebag

 

                   . . . dabbing wax on her lips

on the cold slippery back seat

in a high altitude layby. (p. 4)

 

are other narratives of love, deception, and the wretchedness that results from crossing the lines between gods and humans. Their tales seem dragged in, as if abjection could be a narrative strategy: named, unnamed and guessed-at bodies pulled across the plains of Troy ­­and central Europe. It’s an untidy, horribly messy process.

 

In the second section, Dugdale executes a handbrake turn, a literally dramatic demonstration of power play. Surely there’s a better way to tell these stories, someone says.  Can’t they be staged more clearly? It would help, wouldn’t it, to be able to identify these characters’ ‘active agency’? The challenge comes from a nameless, domineering theatre director (we hear his/her responses to the answers to the questions posed to the actors, but not the actors’ own responses):

 

‘Anguish’ Ok. Anguish… Anguish is really more of an

abstract state, right? Can we translate it into a verb?

A doing word? A word of action. (p. 22).

 

What he/she wants is conflict: ‘where’s the fight if you can’t lift the sword?’ (p. 23)

 

How to show a fight without being drawn into fighting and taking sides is one of the questions posed by The Strongbox.  How to write about violence and conflict, especially in war? Weakening dualities through a process of dispersal – splitting and multiplying examples of abduction, for example (the figure of Helen/not Helen, hints of Persephone, and at the end (more hopeful), a version of Europa) – could be one strategy. Another could be to draw attention to the odd ones out.

 

Section IV, a dialogue between Helen and Menelaus, titled ‘A LESSON IN ANTHROPOLOGY’, has him attempt to explain the origins of the human race, based on multiples of seven: ‘Seven gods made seven men, gave them seven women. Each pair had seven children’ and so on, (p. 29), but Helen stops him when he reaches a count of 168. ‘There’s one spare’, she says, ‘You left one out . . . Maybe a boy, maybe a girl, but someone’s been left out. 7 lots of 7 is 49, an odd number.’ Menelaus adds in an extra, notional one, not an ‘M’ or a ‘W’ he says, ‘Doesn’t matter which . . .  I’ll just do a dot’ (pp. 30-31) but the argument continues, with Helen protesting the idea of ‘having a loner out there . . . it destabilises things . . . someone to peer from the bushes into the campfire circle’ (p. 31) – only for Menelaus to shift ground, making an argument for inherent instability, at a structural level.

 

‘The glory of seven,’ he says, ‘is that in any conflict situation, there will always be inequality . . . Whatever the argument, whatever the cause, there will always be a clear winner.’ But Helen isn’t convinced, especially not by his triumphant, Orwellian conclusion, ‘Conflict is Justice. You see my point? It’s a beautiful structure, if you ignore that one small mistake in my counting’ to which she retorts,

 

It wasn’t a mistake, it’s just there’s a person spare and your myth doesn’t account for them. Where do they go? What do they do? Are they the cause of all that conflict you’ve built into your beautiful shape?’ (p. 32)

 

A tactical error on her part, and it’s no surprise that Menelaus simply turns the argument ad feminam: ‘I could have left you to your death, dispatched you with my own bare hands. After all, you said it first ─you’ve done immeasurable harm.’ (p. 33)

 

Helen might instead have told her own origin story, which puts in an early appearance, rather quietly, very close to the beginning of The Strongbox where, amongst the gewgaws the girl-child leaves behind in her bedroom, is ‘a perspex presentation box for the pink halves / of her birth egg.’ (p. 2)

 

Origin stories, memories, dreams, mementoes, are, self-evidently, very much part of the matter of war, its loot and its causes. Seemingly arbitrary, appallingly fragile:

 

Did the memory begin with me or was it always

chugging idly like an engine

jolting like a hen without a head

 

egg     chicken    egg    chicken    egg  

 

and is remembering merely the sudden exposure

of dream? As when the border guard drags film

from the camera’s body – is recall

the fatal undoing of the sealed? (p. 15)

 

But – in a lighter vein – eggs are also good subjects for riddles, another feature of The Strongbox. As here, in the riddle of the chicken and the egg, and Menelaus’ version, in the dialogue quoted above, of the St Ives riddle (‘As I was going to St Ives, / I met a man with seven wives’).  A digression, or a deliberate distraction? In any case, a good way to counter over-weening rationalism. And the folkloric association with eggs and treasure, exemplified by the riddle that Bilbo Baggins posed to the Gollum in The Hobbit (‘A box without hinges, key or lid / Yet golden treasure inside is hid’) is made explicit towards the end of the book, where egg and strongbox / treasure-chest fold into one another, as they might in a Russian fairy-tale.

 

‘There was once an egg / the biggest egg in the world’ the story begins

 

and it grew and grew until it was so

big it couldn’t be moved from the eye where it lay

the largest eye in the world

set deep in the deepest socket

deeper than the hull of the Titanic

deeper than the sea itself . . .  (p. 67)

 

 

only for the tale to be interrupted, turned to dramatic dialogue:

 

– like, this deep! (says the god) space-deep

(dancing and spreading his arms as wide as wings)

– very    very    deep

(opening his own eyes so wide they float above his head)

But imagine now

all that depth concertinaed up

a million little folds, a million billion creases

folded and folded and folded until it’s

– tiny weeny

weeny teeny

– stuffed into a little capsule, a . . . what . . .

a locket?

yes! (pp. 67-8)

 

and, with the narrator spurring on the increasingly excited god, the story continues, first making the treasure ever smaller and smaller, the locket placed ‘in a jewellery box’, then in secret drawers within drawers ‘in a campaign chest in a tent’, then letting the scene open up until we see ‘a wide plain’ covered with tents, in one of which, a gilded one

 

 . . .  a hero walks up and down.

yes, he walks up and down in anguish and rage

(pause)

– but he is not the subject of this story?

no

(hesitates)

not him. (p. 68)

 

By the end, the narrator – and not the god – has the last word, and we see that the hero has been expelled from the tale.

 

Similarly, in the final section of the book, Zeus finds himself edged out of his story, become a mere ‘steer on a rope’ with ‘no words / and little hope’ (p. 77) while Europa disappears, having crowned him with flowers. The very last word in The Strongbox, one of a sequence of apocalyptic scenarios staged as ‘frames’, is ‘lyre’ (in which it’s hard not to hear ‘liar’), as it might be in the hands of Apollo, who here shows up in the guise of a ‘dystrophic man’. (p. 78) The box stays sealed but the song, and the story, go on.

 

Maria Stepanova’s Holy Winter 20/21 also traffics in magic and folk-tales, travel in distant lands and extraordinary transformations. It’s partly chrestomathy, a patchwork of direct quotations and translations, and partly an anthology of variations on themes of cold and winter, evocations of Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow-Queen, for example, and C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Other sources include correspondence between the Russian Empress Catherine II and her lover, Grigory Potemkin, and the fictional adventures of Baron Munchausen. ‘All is enchanted ground, and fairy land,’ as Joseph Addison described the text that is another of Stepanova’s sources for Holy Winter, his own retelling of the Travels of Sir John Mandeville.

 

But whereas Addison’s purpose is presumably to disabuse the reader of any expectation of verisimilitude in Mandeville’s writings, the enchantments in Holy Winter are sparkling, enticing threads passing through much darker, factual ground. Central to the book is the theme of exile, with translations of short sections from Ovid’s Tristia appearing throughout, a counterpart to the displacement Stepanova experienced on her return to Russia during the Covid-19 pandemic.

 

Ice and isolation speak to one another here, with the one sometimes stopping the mouth of the other, as in Stepanova’s version of Ovid (retranslated from her Russian into English by Dugdale) writing from on board ship:

 

The winds were icy, I made conversation with them ­–

After all I had nobody else – and then the cold suddenly spoke:

‘Still writing the poems, old fool? Well keep writing, if you must.’

And I, thinking I could strike a bargain: ‘What if I put an end to it,

Would you leave me be then? No more literature, no more poetry

Nothing good ever came of it, here I am rocking on the black waters

For the sake of poems. Would you cease blowing in through my lips,

   snatching at my bones?’

I thought I’d deceived winter, but she sucked me in;

No sooner had we made land she was leafing through my ribs,

   through pages in my notebook

As in a police raid, making up her charge sheet.

Now I see I am exiled – not to distant lands

But thrust deep into a season, like a sleeve

On one of the stinking fur coats they wear round here. (p. 18)

 

This season that is and isn’t land, this season that is exile, is also snowbound Narnia, as ruled by C S Lewis’s White Witch (fur coats, both stinking ‘foreign’ ones and tempting, liminal curtains within wardrobes, sometimes smelling of naphthalene, and(?) /or wrapped around wintry temptresses are a recurring theme here), and it’s the northern lands of Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen stories, too. In this ‘fifth season’ of eternal winter, time itself freezes, as in Stepanova’s descriptions of locked-down cities:

 

Empty shops, piled high with goods

Restaurants with the chairs leant against the tables

Offices with last year’s calendar

Fixed on a page with March’s girl (p. 24)

 

In such a place, taking a leap of imagination (and Holy Winter is all about such acrobatics), in the deepest depths of a distant winter, voices themselves might freeze, congealed into a state of suspended animation, as described by Addison in his version of Mandeville’s account of a journey to Nova Zembla:

 

. . . our words froze in the air before they could reach the ears of the person to whom they were spoken. . . [and] upon the increase of the cold, the whole company grew dumb, or rather deaf. For every man was sensible, as we afterwards found, that he spoke as well as ever, but the sounds no sooner took air than they were condensed and lost. (p. 19)

 

– which is picked up by Ovid, who is missing Rome and ‘thinking of [his fellow writers] all rushing about / From one poetry reading to the next’, not sparing him a thought, while he struggles to write anything at all, longing ‘to spit a few frozen iambs / Blunt as the points of arrows in these parts’ (p. 19), and left to imagine ‘a snowstorm over the forum’, while ‘between the columns of the Parthenon / Lodged little drifts like fur hats’. (p. 20)

 

Meanwhile, Mandeville and his crew are left, struck deaf and dumb, for ‘three weeks’ and just over 20 pages, until ‘a dry clattering sound’ is heard (p. 40), which turns out to be newly melted consonants, to be followed by a susurration of ‘hissing’ sibilants, then, slowly, in syllables, words and finally sentences, all the language spoken on the ship for those weeks is released into the air.

 

This bizarre and wonderful sonic conceit is mentioned in Stepanova’s acknowledgements, as a way of describing her process. The text for the acknowledgements is shown in an inverted pyramid, as if the words in Holy Winter, coming as they do from many languages, drawn from many sources, which ‘all resound at once, and so cannot be fully understood,’ are nonetheless being poured into a melting-pot, funnelled down into ‘this book’ (the pyramid’s last line, p. 53), only to re-emerge, rather like the way the broken-down pieces of conversations re-appear as the freezing air of Nova Zembla starts to warm. The difference being that Holy Winter’s words find themselves in new places, scattered, changing, proliferating.  ‘In this book,’ Stepanova says for a first time, near the top of the upturned pyramid, ‘you / can hear these once-frozen and now-thawing voices as / they multiply in the telling, flushed by translation, / crackling in the cold.’

 

Amongst these voices is that of Dante, cued in with a line that could stand for the whole of the book: ‘The plot always thickens in winter / All roads lead right to it.’ Now the cold is given another dimension: we travel with the poet as ‘he descends lower and lower / Soaking up all he sees like a sponge/ Until he arrives in that place where everything freezes / Even the sponge.’ (p. 49) On the way down towards this, the Ninth Circle of Hell, we catch a glimpse of Andersen’s Kay, busy with ‘treasures’, his grandmother and his childhood sweetheart forgotten, and then taking another plunge, we find ourselves approaching

 

1. . . the lowest point of human misery

. . . a frozen lake

And those who were frozen within, like fish

Scaled with icy tears

Eyes that protruded sharp ice needles

And speech that could neither be gnawed at nor thawed.’ (p 50)

 

Unlike Kay (who was finally redeemed and returned to a happy domestic life with those who loved him) ‘These are the traitors. They are beyond forgiveness’, their adamantine, irreducible words – things once said, never to be taken back? – a striking contrast to the play of freezing and melting phonemes epitomised by Mandeville’s mariners.

 

Now that we have plumbed the depths, in a flash, Stepanova’s dream logic transports us back up to the surface, to wide open spaces where ‘There are no walls, no roof / Only the Northern Lights / And a few shared histories / Opened anew, like little doors.’ (p. 50) And the book ends on a domestic note, with a poem that I suspect is one of a handful from classical Chinese included in Holy Winter, translated into English by Kenneth Rexroth, then from English into Russian by Stepanova and finally, as explained in the acknowledgements, from her Russian ‘back into a different English’ by Dugdale. (p. 53) This is a charming and comforting short lyric, set by itself (settling itself?) at the bottom of the last page of poetry, describing a ‘little house’ in a snowy landscape at night. The poet hears ‘the dogs barking / By the village gates / Through snow and wind / Someone is coming home.’ (p. 51) Within this tiny, isolated dwelling-place, the magic art of translation, here figured as dissolution, takes place, as if the speaker is sipping hot tea: ‘Foreign words melt in the cheek / Like sugar cubes.’ (p. 51) Poems are translated in the mouth, through and with sound and, yes, ‘a few shared histories’.

 

 

References:

Sasha Dugdale. ‘”I sometimes wonder why I translate. It expands something in you”: An interview on translating from Russian, poetry, and publishing,’ 2021, available at https://scroll.in/article/1004299/i-sometimes-wonder-why-i-translate-it-expands-something-in-you-translator-sasha-dugdale