Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize 2021
Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2020
An Observer Book of the Year 2020
Deformations includes two large-scale works related in their preoccupation with biographical and mythical narrative. 'Welfare Handbook' explores the life and art of Eric Gill, the well-known English letter cutter, sculptor and cultural figure, who is known to have sexually abused his daughters. The poem draws on material from Gill's letters, diaries, notes and essays as part of a lyrical exploration of the conjunction between aesthetics, subjectivity and violence. 'Pitysad' is a series of simultaneously occurring fragments composed around themes and characters from Homer's Odyssey. It considers how trauma is disguised and deformed through myth and art. Acting as a bridge between these two works is a series of individual poems on the creation and destruction of cultural and mythical conventions.
About the Author :
Sasha Dugdale has published six collections with Carcanet. The Strongbox is her most recent book (May, 2024). Her fifth collection Deformations was shortlisted for the 2020 T. S. Eliot Prize and Derek Walcott Prize. Joy (2017) was a Poetry Book Society Choice and the title poem was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2016. Her recent translations for theatre include Bad Roads and The Grainstore by Ukrainian playwright Natalya Vorozhbit, for production by the Royal Court Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company. She has published numerous translations of Russian-language women’s writing. Her translation of Maria Stepanova’s novel In Memory of Memory (Fitzcarraldo, 2021), was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, the Weidenfeld Prize, Warwick Prize for Women in Translation and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Dugdale won the MLA Lois Roth Award for this translation. She is former editor of Modern Poetry in Translation, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Review :
'The brutality and the beauty are left to stand in uncomfortable juxtaposition in poems which repeatedly situate themselves in scenes of ambiguous feeling... This is the poetry of "endless small tracks", richly attuned to balance alternative perspectives and reconcile contrarious trajectories in its tiniest details'
Joseph Turner, Oxford Review of Books
'An ambitious and soliloquising work... By setting the Trojan War in the 21st century, exploring the dynamics of political power during a siege, and dramatising connections with strangers on foreign land, Dugdale weaves in strands of contemporary concern about neo-colonialism and the refugee crisis.'
Isabelle Baafi, Magma
'This is writing that flows with many voices, with uncompromising acts of ethical energy, with writing that turns on itself and offers up for display its own protocols, gifts and virtù with astonishing and intricate candour and difficulty, and yet communicated in this tour de force plainstyle that judges its signifying powers to represent at the same time as breaking through, by way of its very deformation of tradition and assumption, to a moving communicableness of shared witness'
Adam Piette, Blackbox Manifold
'Dugdale is the real thing.'
Tristram Fane Saunders, Telegraph
'This is sly, subtle, elliptical work, entrapping both subject and reader in something queasily human [...] It's the sign of a poet utterly in control of her gifts. This may seem a strange thing to say about a book so filled with unreliable narrators, but in Deformations Dugdale proves hers is a voice you can trust.'
Tristram Fane Saunder, The Telegraph, where Deformations was Poetry Book of the Month (September 2020)
'With it's spare, muscular language, Deformations views our distorting predilection for myth-making with no nonsense clarity'
John Field, T.S. Eliot Prize
'Deformations has the ability to change the landscape of how we talk about abuse and trauma.'
Rachel Long, Observer Books of the Year 2020
