Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 69
ISBN: 9781781724989
Publication date: May 9, 2019
Price: £9.99
A fascination for history, both as a source of human drama and a field for artful speculation, characterises this collection of poems by Sheenagh Pugh from Seren. Here we are with the rebels who sack the Palace of Savoy or inside the head of the disturbed King of France, who was convinced he was made of glass, or with the Bishop Thorlack, blessing a demon-haunted cliff.
We are as much taken with the gaps in the chronicles, the elisions, the rumours, as we are with the relics: stone ruins, statues plagued by seagulls, the Maid of Norway in a stained-glass window. The marginalia in illuminated manuscripts inspires a poem with ‘asides’ by the Monk in a medieval scriptorium. There is a heartbreakingly lovely poem ‘The Centenaries’ that vividly evokes the battles of World War One as their anniversaries arrive in sequence. There is a thoughtful series evoking a trip to Canada by a ‘tour’ through its time zones.
Primarily about people, this collection is also steeped in northern weathers and waters of the Scottish Isles, where Pugh now lives. The title poem refers to the abrupt darkness in winter afternoons, but also to a theme of timelessness running through the collection as in ‘Visitor’ where the protagonist is a skull that emerges from an eroded cliff only to lurch back and disappear with it, “like a neighbour who called in/ just once, and whom we never got to know” a both stern and lovely evocation, a memento mori.
In Afternoons Go Nowhere the past seems more relevant to the present than ever, human nature never entirely predictable and often non-sensical, the natural world seeming full of a paradoxical beauty. There is also a piece entirely sympathetic to the digital new age where people in a ‘Bus Station’ are seen staring at their phones, the poem sings praises of connectivity in an otherwise dull context. Complex but with clear themes and lucid, musical language, Sheenagh Pugh’s tenth collection will delight discriminating readers.
Sheenagh Pugh
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. Sheenagh has published nine collections of poetry and translations plus a Selected Poems and a sort of mini-Selected, two novels and critical study of fan fiction.
She used to lecture in Creative Writing at the University of Glamorgan, and has won numerous prizes for her work, including the Babel Prize for translation and the Arts Council of Wales’ Book of the Year in 2000. For more information about Sheenagh Pugh visit her writing blog at www.sheenaghpugh.livejournal.com
“Sheenagh Pugh is an acute writer and this is an enjoyable, highly recommended collection.”
M. C. Caseley, Stride Magazine
“Afternoons Go Nowhere is an unflinching celebration of the human condition, written in lucid language that reveals aching complexities. I very much recommend it.”
Matthew Stewart, Rogue Strands
“Pugh’s storytelling, structure and eye for detail are so good that these poems manage to work even without knowing the essential facts behind them. The poems come out like anecdotes, richly populated, full of incident and wry comment. When the narrator drops away and one comes across a sonnet with nothing in it but the tide and wind, the change strikes one like a tour-de-force.”
Thomas Tyrrell, Wales Arts Review
“Despite the haunting title poem and other finely observed, Shetland-based studies of seascape and season, in her latest collection Afternoons Go Nowhere Sheenagh Pugh’s alertness to human characters, situations and voices, historical and contemporary, continues undiminished.”
Carol Rumens, The Guardian
‘These poems are richly ambitious, but unfailingly humane.’
Matthew Francis
‘Pugh’s lyrical, time-travelling narratives, full of wit and pathos, put the human condition in its place. Here characters and landscapes hauntingly evoke the ‘space where someone was’.’
Paul Henry
‘It makes for a hugely cheerful read, during which you’ll find yourself falling in love with the most unlikely of heroes. At these times when so much of what we read, view and experience is overshadowed by future dreads, Afternoons Go Nowhere is a sunlit respite we all sorely need. ‘
SkyLightRain
‘This collection is an entertaining adventure from first to last. Witty, astute and moving in equal measure, it is a blast of clear air from the North.’
Fiona Owen
‘This is poetry that is always tugging at the reader to travel a little farther, straining to get round the next corner. In its scope it is ambitious, and in its approach gentle and humane. Pugh’s writing is wide, eclectic and imaginative, with these miraculously distant places almost tangible between the lines.’
Ben Ray, The North
