Böcker av Sheenagh Pugh

Sheenagh Pugh's poems continue to entertain and delight her many admirers. In Stonelight, her ninth collection, the keynote is celebration. The opening section includes a moving series called 'Arctic Chart' which commemorates the various people (and one ship) who gave their names to features on the Arctic map. Also here is 'Envying Owen Beattie' (winner of the Forward Prize for Best Poem of 1998), where the discovery of a frozen explorer under permafrost inspires some unusual thoughts. The middle section, including 'The Faithful Wife', makes up a sequence of persona poems in the character of a middle-aged woman in love with a young man. Other poems deal with what Sheenagh Pugh calls "the usual suspects: Shetland, Cardiff, mortality, slightly weird and misplaced people." There are also more of the poet's fine translations from the French and German. "Sheenagh Pugh's work's accessibility is a feature of the clarity and inevitability with which she can pursue intuitions into territories of luminous significance."Poetry Review "Savour the richness of this collection: here is a poet who plays with words seriously and light-heartedly to build fine bridges between the external world and the inner world of imagination." Poetry Monthly Sheenagh Pugh is known to thousands of poetry readers for 'Sometimes', her much anthologised 'poem on the underground' and for her Selected Poems, a set text in schools. She currently lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Glamorgan, and has won numerous prizes for her work, including the Babel Prize for translation and the ACW Book of the Year in 2000.

Her characteristic wit and precision are fully in evidence in Sheenagh Pugh's latest collection of poems, Sing for the Taxman. Dedicated to the proposition that poetry must, first of all, entertain the reader, these poems give delight on first reading and pleasure upon contemplation. A day mountain climbing inspires the beautiful three-part pastoral 'Climbing Hermaness', that opens the book. In 'Five Voices', we learn about the strange and tragic execution of Lieutenant Hans Hermann von Katte in 1730, through the dramatic confessions of his intimates. Later we meet, among others, 'Mozart Playing Billiards', 'The Last Wolf in Scotland', and Guy Fawkes' girlfriend ('Remember, Remember'). Half a dozen of Sheenagh Pugh's excellent translations from the poetry of Jammes, Holty, Von Hofmannswaldau and others, round off this thoroughly enjoyable collection. "This one I got hooked on from the minute I plunged into the first poem..."Poetry Review "... among the top two or three poets of her generation writing English poetry in Wales"Poetry Wales Sheenagh Pugh is known to thousands of poetry readers for 'Sometimes', her much anthologised 'poem on the underground' and for her Selected Poems, a set text in schools. She currently lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Glamorgan, and has won numerous prizes for her work, including the Babel Prize for translation and the ACW Book of the Year in 2000.

Elisions, displacements, journeys, memories of journeys, dreams: this new collection of poems by Sheenagh Pugh has a pervasive elegiac quality.

Sheenagh Pugh's tenth collection is steeped in the winds and weathers of the Scottish Isles, and enlivened by an acute understanding of the human condition: mortality and ageing are addressed with characteristic wit, and the foibles of historical kings, queens and commoners are exposed to her sharply scrutinizing eye.