Elisions, displacements, journeys, memories of journeys, dreams: this collection of poems by Sheenagh Pugh has a pervasive elegiac quality. Known for her incisive narratives, many of these new poems work more by implication than explication.

Dyma gasgliad o farddoniaeth gan Sheenagh Pugh sy'n cynnwys cerddi ag iddynt naws farwnadol. Mae llawer o'r cerddi yn sôn am deithiau, atgofion a breuddwydion.

This new collection from Sheenagh Pugh takes us on travels to the far north and the far past. It holds laments for golden lads come to dust and strives to capture the unique ‘now’ in ‘a stream of flying/ glittering, passing moments’. Her beautifully phrased elegies celebrate young heroes for their ‘brief/ instant aloft,/...as when a boy falling,/ still glowed from having once/ touched the sun’ and for the love they inspired.

Pugh is a novelist as well as a celebrated poet and she excels in telling tales like the sequence following the extraordinary life of 'Murat Reis' or Janszoon (Dutch privateer turned Barbary slaver and ancestor of American millionaires) but it is for the fascination of the states of minds which 'revel in the chance/ to refashion themselves'. Tristan Jones - another 'refashioner' - is here caught in the moment when he contemplates creatures ‘whose bounds were fixed/ by their own fancy’, while in ‘The Pause' a Tsunami survivor faces the moment he chooses to become someone else. She is as perceptive on personal and contemporary feelings of separation, loss and longing as she is entering the minds of Barates of Palmyra (in 'Regina') or the God Odin in 'Missing Fire'.

Throughout she is exploring the nature of memory and languages: how they carry unique ways of thought (which cannot be kept alive by recording -'pinned down on paper' like dead specimens) whether they are the private codes and silences of a long-married couple or the language of light among deep-sea creatures. In one of her finest, 'Translation', a man's mental map of his native area (now changed) is recreated in music:

'...he sees: the spaces.
Across empty tracts of black
He traces the patterns
Of all the missing stars
What he can do: translate
darkened windows, lost friends
into music. Grief reaches upwards
and falls back, in an air...'

Sheenagh Pugh's style is elegant, deceptively free, but look at the subtle chime of half-rhymes in the first transition of ‘Murat Reis’. This is an assured artist distilling the strange paradoxes of human life into poems of memorable insight.

Caroline Clark

It is possible to use this review for promotional purposes, but the following acknowledgment should be included: A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council.

Gellir defnyddio'r adolygiad hwn at bwrpas hybu, ond gofynnir i chi gynnwys y gydnabyddiaeth ganlynol: Adolygiad oddi ar www.gwales.com, trwy ganiatâd Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru.