Joy

Sasha Dugdale's fourth Carcanet collection, Joy, features the poem of that title which received the 2016 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. "Joy" is a monologue in the voice of William Blake's wife Catherine, exploring the creative partnership between the artist and his wife, and the nature of female creativity. The Forward judges called it "an extraordinarily sustained visionary piece of writing". The poems in Joy mark a new departure for Dugdale, who expresses in poetry a hitherto ‘silent' dialogue which she began as an editor of Modern Poetry in Translation with writers such as Don Mee Choi, Kim Hyesoon, Maria Stepanova and Svetlana Alexeivich. Dugdale combines an open interest in the historical fate of women and in the treacherous fictional shaping of history. In the abundant, complex and not always easy range of voices in Joy she attempts to redress the linear nature of remembrance and history and restore the ‘maligned and misaligned'.