Dorothy (2020)

Forthcoming with Broken Sleep Books

Throughout ‘Dorothy’, I develop a structure for poetic writing and research, stemming from the movement of water on a molecular and geographical scale, considering osmosis and the meander of the river as a method to fill the gaps in the history of Waterloo Bridge.

Dorothy is a stunning and crucial intervention into our relationship with water, the Thames River, and the history of Waterloo Bridge. Mediating water through poem, through film, through photograph, body, bath, archive, and even rabbit; Hughes’s poignant work acknowledges and disrupts our continual dependence on water, crafting encounters with the River Thames on a colossal and microscopic scale. The visceral diagrammatic and hand drawn shapes connect the structural properties of water to the female body of the poet – a connection that is most keenly felt in its absence; ‘via archive’ serving as an eloquent reminder of female erasure within this moment of ecological crisis in which water exists as both precious commodity and abundant resource.

- Cat Chong

Dorothyis a collection of ‘via’ poems that conveys stories of numberless nameless forgotten women who lived, worked, and died by the river Thames and its tributaries. Briony Hughes locates these women – dripping and drowned in ghastly Victorian poetry; smiling with satisfaction in black and white photographs; brazen in blue overalls during the war effort – restoring their names where possible and paying tribute to their lives. The eponymous Dorothy indicates the ‘role official / named only as Dorothy’, recently identified by feminist historians in photographs of Waterloo Bridge’s builders, one of thousands of women working in the British construction industry in the 1940s. She is, as Hughes writes, ‘ankle tied / to cement / blocks’, the weight of men’s refusal to admit her labour, her strength, her indispensability to capital dragging her down to the murky depths of history. In Hughes’s work, she resurfaces in a prismatic burst of bubbles, detritus, and putrefaction.

Waterloo Bridge is also known as The Ladies Bridge and The Bridge of Sighs. The latter appellation is used by Victorian poet Thomas Hood in a poem of the same name, in which an allegedly poor, pregnant, and outcast woman jumps from the bridge to her death. Hood imagines the woman’s body bound in the river as ‘the wave constantly / Drips from her clothing’ and urges readers to forgive her sins and ‘Take her up instantly, / Loving, not loathing – ’. In the first poem (or rather, the first textual piece, as the collection begins and ends with drawings and photographs), Hughes salvages language from Hood’s poem, channelling dynamism back into the woman’s watery grave, allowing words and images to rise and undulate; the poem’s stutters, sighs, and gasps accelerating and intensifying as ‘clothing the wave the wave clothes’. The influence of Caroline Bergvall – queer feminist adept in utilising the materiality and fluidity of language in order to translate its histories, contexts, and usages – is felt throughout this collection, most keenly in the moments where Hughes develops poetic forms and patterns that function like aqueducts and sewage pipes, conveying readers through historical stuff to the queer feminist horizon of the other side.

Hughes does not attempt to resurrect the tragic woman, or to give her a voice, for we will never know her name let alone hear her speak. But we can think of her; we can learn about the conditions of her life and remember her death apart from the paternalist moralising tone of Hood’s poem. 100 years later, the possibilities for women go beyond jumping from that bridge to building it; Dorothy might be understood as an embodiment of those unknown women – those ciphers in poems and photographs – whose lives and deaths must not be relegated to the realm of the unknowable. We follow Hughes, like Adrienne Rich before her, and dive into the wreck. Hughes’s poetry is waterlogged in the most fabulously wayward, buoyant, and leaky sense. Down in the depths we might come upon ‘globular-bulbous’ lifeforms swelling in bubble bath, love-nourished honey rabbits, remedies for political fervour that soothe without subduing any of those rebellious flames. Jump in, the water’s dirty! 

– Nisha Ramayya