on Sasha Dugdale and Maria Stepanova

What To Do When You Can Do Nothing?

Sasha Dugdale, The Strongbox (Carcanet) £12.99
Maria Stepanova, translated by Sasha Dugdale, Holy Winter 20/21 (Bloodaxe) £12

Sasha Dugdale’s latest collection, The Strongbox, and her translation of Maria Stepanova’s collection Holy Winter 20/21 were both published in 2024. The two books stepped into the world hand-in-hand, and their reckoning with war, pandemic, ecological crisis and displacement are gut-wrenchingly pertinent.

For the past few months I’ve written, unwritten and rewritten this review, as the world seems to unravel faster than my brain can comprehend. In 1988 my history teacher told us with gloomy confidence that the Soviet Union would last another 100 years. A couple of years earlier, radioactive clouds from Chernobyl had drifted over my Sussex village. I’ve never believed I live outside the stream of history, but with every year that passes I feel more forcibly its turbulent currents. Writing has become difficult; reading too, intermittently.

Must we write a poem
about this, o Muse? How
do we even begin?

writes the Ukrainian poet Oksana Maksymchuk in her debut collection Still City (Carcanet, 2024). Silence is one option, but an option that feels akin to defeat; and maybe not an option after all as Stepanova suggests:

And what to do when you can do nothing?
We sing and we sweat, both bodily functions.

Some books you tumble into, like falling headfirst down a well; an immersive experience. This is The Strongbox, from its opening sequence, ‘Anatomy of an Abduction’ – and the ...