The Movement of Bodies

by Sheenagh Pugh

A strange assortment of characters inhabit these poems, including George Mackay Brown, Johnny Cash, William Dampier, a lion-keeper in wartime Afganistan, and a shipload of sailors in a Shetland churchyard. The long central work of the collection provides an elegiac meditation on the life and death of a young soldier who succumbed to hypothermia during the Napoleonic Wars. Finally, and quite unexpectedly, the poem "Googlisms" provides an outpouring of quirky definitions from a website that collects information from the search engine Google.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published May 28, 2006

About the author

I was born in 1950. I live in Shetland with my husband. I have published nine collections of poetry and translations, plus a Selected Poems and a sort of mini-Selected, two novels and a critical study of fan fiction (see Books). I translate poems mainly from German but sometimes also from French and Ancient Greek. I read German and Russian at the University of Bristol and used to teach creative writing at the University of Glamorgan. I still visit Cardiff, where I used to live, regularly.

My interests are language, history, northern landscapes from Shetland to the Arctic and all points in between, snooker, mortality, cyberspace (I waste massive amounts of time online) and above all, people. I like to use poems to commemorate people and places, sometimes to amuse, to have a go at things I don't like (censorship, intolerance, pomposity) and above all to entertain.

I have been accused of being "populist" and "too accessible", both of which I hope are true.

I have won many prizes and awards, including the Forward Prize for best single poem of 1998, the Bridport Prize, the PHRAS prize, the Cardiff International Poetry Prize (twice) and the British Comparative Literature Association's Translation Prize. My poems have been included in several anthologies, notably Poems on the Underground and The Hutchinson Book of Post-War British Poetry. They have also been set to music, have appeared on the trams of Helsinki and the St Petersburg Underground, and have been translated into German, French, Italian, Russian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch.

My website is at http://sheenagh.webs.com/ and my blog is at http://sheenaghpugh.livejournal.com/. It's usually about writing-related stuff.

I'm not adding any more friends on Goodreads and will ignore all requests - nothing personal, it's just too much trouble.

Reviews

[Caz Eddy · Rating 4 out of 5]

So many good poems in this collection, that I just don't tire of reading. Interesting titles promise and deliver stories and moments and thoughts so perfectly, from out of history to our modern day. Sheenagh Pugh is a huge inspiration to my own poetry - I'm basically in awe.

[hh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pugh excels at evoking a landscape and life in a few well-placed brushstrokes. these poems are historical in scope, even when they dwell on the personal. lively.