The Movement of Bodies

Like the protagonist in the title poem of Sheenagh Pugh’s tenth collection – a mathematician startled to find himself in love – we are led into these poems by apparently straightforward tales that swerve into lyricism or surprise us with paradox. Many of Pugh’s trademark themes and ideas appear here: a drunken snooker ace, harshly beautiful landscapes in the northern isles, quirky characters glimpsed on the street. The poet’s fascination with the internet continues with a collection of ’Googlisms’, culled from a website that throws up definitions and contexts of a search term from sites trawled by the search engine Google. This collection is a marriage of tradition and technology which brings poetry to the cyber-generation. Recommended by the Poetry Book Society.