Sasha Dugdale Joy

Winner of the 2017 Poetry Book Society Winter Choice Award. From the winner of the 2016 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, and a 2017 Society of Authors Cholmondeley Award, comes this urgent and powerful new collection which turns a sharp eye towards current and historical geopolitics. Combining an open interest in the historical fate of women and particularly female creators, and an interest in the fictional and dangerous shaping of history, Joy addresses the current sense of international unease and the landscape of gender politics. The collection includes the Forward Prize-winning long poem "Joy", a monologue spoken by William Blake's wife Catherine exploring the creative partnership between the artist-poet and his wife and the nature of female creativity in general. It was described as "an extraordinarily sustained visionary piece of writing" by the Forward Prize judges. Alongside "Joy" are a series of poems which have grown out of Dugdale's time as editor of Modern Poetry in Translation, and her illustrious career as a translator. These poems are an abandoning and undermining of the lyrical - among them, the poem "Days" which combines a response to Svetlana Alexievich's seminal (untranslated) work on women during the Second World War, "U voiny ne zhenskoye litso" ("War Doesn't Have a Woman's Face") and Dugdale's experiences translating poetry and plays about the war in the Donbass region. Dugdale's interest in geopolitics has led to a new poetics in her work, and to more experimental and formally unstable poems. But above all, they have given the poet a new sense of purpose and potential.