Stonelight

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.