Red House

The ghosts and presences that flit about on the margins of people’s lives are evoked in Sasha Dugdale’s third collection of poetry. They are found at the edge of towns where superstores and allotments blur an older landscape, in Europe where emigrants leave their gods, their neighbors, and their memories, and across the chalk Downs of the poet’s native Sussex. Haunted by history and confronted by primal brutalities, these poems trace the ghosts’ shapes through folk song, lament, and lyric poetry while proclaiming the fierce, bright authenticity that is “all the proof we need that we’re alive.”