Sheenagh Pugh is another poet who has frequently written poems on historical subjects. But where the ‘prompts’ for Crossley-Holland’s imagination mostly take the form of landscapes and objects, Pugh seems largely to find her stimuli in her reading. In Afternoons Go Nowhere, for example, one delightful poem, ‘Lieutenant Schmidt’s Ideal Lady’ is followed by a note telling us that “the facts behind this poem are related in Southern Adventure, vol. 5 of Konstantin Paustovsky’s autobiography Story of a Life”. It is a minor sadness that this delightful book doesn’t have more such notes. Indeed, some of Pugh’s titles and poems can pose minor problems of identification. The poems always intrigue and satisfy even if one doesn’t know quite what or who the historical subject is, but such ignorance can be a distraction. Pugh’s historical range – in terms of both place and time – is striking. She moves, and moves us, from London in 1391, during the Peasants’ Revolve (‘Sacking the Palace of Savoy’) to Dieppe in the 19th century (‘Seascape with Dying Author’); from 12th century Iceland (‘The Offering’) to 15th century France (‘The Glass King’ and ‘The Byzantine Emperor’s Entry into Paris’). Character always intrigues her, whether it be Lord Cardigan’s horse at the Charge of the Light Brigade (‘Ronald’), Charles IV of France (‘The Glass King’) or Dan Leno (‘The Moon’). Pugh’s poetic interests are, though, not only historical, nor her ‘sources’ wholly bookish. A sequence of four poems ‘Time Zones’, seems to be based on a visit to Canada, the four poems carrying, respectively, the following sub-titles ‘Montreal, Quebec’, ‘Somewhere in Manitoba’, ‘Jasper, Alberta: Canada Day’ and ‘Vancouver, British Columbia’. But another Canadian poem, ‘A New Psalm of Montreal: with apologies to Samuel Butler’ is, as its full-title suggests, to some extend in dialogue with an earlier poem (1890), ‘A Psalm of Montreal’ by Samuel Butler (1835-1902). There are other poems, such as ‘Oral English’ (which is about the difficulties a Japanese student of English has in understanding the polari spoken by Julian and Sandy on Round the Horne) and ‘Airline Pilots’ which examine niche languages and ways of talking. Amongst the memorable ‘historical’ poems I would pick out (while regretfully not mentioning other) ‘Seascape with Dying Author: Dieppe, 1870’. Pugh doesn’t tell the reader who the dying author is. By the sheer change of my having recently read a biography of Alexander Dumas (1802-1970) I realized at once who it was. This knowledge clarifies things. Dumae père died the day before Prussian armies invaded France, in the course of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71). Pugh’s closing stanzas delightfully invest this fact with a ‘literary’ significance:

Only the day after
his death will the Prussians march in,
almost as if they feared,
while he lives, that the swordsmen
with their plumed hats and rapiers
might rise up, young again,

from the place in his mind,
where he kept the matter of fancy,
still bright, still destines
to be the enemy
of the dull, the disciplined,
and scatter their army.

The closing pares of Afternoons Go Nowhere include a number of powerful poems which go beyond specific historical events or personalities and consider, instead, the larger movements of time, matters of mutability, impermanence and death. Each of the two most striking of such poems starts from a quotation. A fine sonnet, is titles ‘The more of ages, the nearer’, a title qhich abridges a line by Robert Henryson (c.1435-c.1505) – the whole line forming the epigraph of Pugh’s poem 0 “The moyr of age, the nerer hevenes blisse’. Pugh’s poem is clearly divided into an octave and a sestet. In the octave we are introduced to a man who, in his youth aspired to be an astronaut. Now, older, he recognizes that has his dream been realized he would have missed “sunsets, woodsmoke, a whole March / without celandines”. The same things he is conscious of loosing soon as he grows older. the volta of Pugh’s sonnet is beautifully effects”

…The more of age, the nearer,

not to heaven: that’s neither here not there,
but to what is in plain sight
and always was, the earth beneath his feet
that now, even for a day, he would not leave
before he must: no not to have

the run of all the unnumbered galaxies.

The collection ends with a longer and more complex poem, related to the ubi sunt tradition: ‘Where beth they, before us werer?”. The title comes from an anonymous 13th century English poem, but the poem’s epigraph is taken from Empedocles: “For it is impossible for anything to come to be from what is not, and it cannot be brought about that that which is should be utterly destroyed”. The poem has its profundities, but this being Sheenagh Pugh, it also has its moment of wit. I have had to leave many dimensions of Afternoons Go Nowhere undiscussed, but it should, I think, be sufficient recommendation to say that this is one of Sheenagh Pugh’s very finest collections. If you know her world you will surely want to read this book; if you don’t, you really should read it.

In poetry, the parochial is often also the universal. Look no further than the worldwide readership of Larkin’s down-at-heel parables of postwar Hull existence for proof of this. Sheenagh Pugh’s poetry is much more stoically optimistic than Larkin’s, but she also has the knack of turning a small insight into a much larger exploration.

Several of the poems in this, Pugh’s tenth collection, are rooted in her Shetland environment: ‘Rules of Conversation: Hoswick’ explores the local colloquial tang, then deconstructs the casual to reveal something more universally worrying:

   Don’t ask where people live. It’s where
   do you stay? Our tenancy
   in the world is a transitory matter.

Other poems here, such as ‘The View’ and ‘The Man Who Disliked Crocuses’ are more narrative in tone, interrogating lonely lives and probing a little into interior life. These are affecting and careful landscapes, lacunae left for the reader to consider.

This is, however, considerable variety here, beyond Shetland: several poems explore Canadian spaces, or travel to the past. The mad King of France who thought he was made of glass (Charles VI) features in two of them. Other, more occasional pieces demonstrate the tact of Pugh’s writing: one of the best of these is ‘The Centenaries’, which finds a new way to discuss the centenary of the First World War. ‘Three years now they have been trudging by’, this begins, as the anniversaries pass by in commemoration, but then Pugh sharply notes the process of media-fuelled observation:

                     ...And when the Armistice,
   all flags and gravestones, has had its moment
   and tramped off into the dust-cloud,
   they’ll close the road, rename it 'history'
   and forget the names on its signs...

This question, of what is transitory and what remains, recurs in many of the poems here. The collection concludes with ‘Wher beth they, bifor us weren?’ [….which I would roughly translate as ‘Where are those who came before us?’]. This is an ambitious piece, underlined by an accompanying epithet from Empedocles​, essentially concerning the transmutation of living matter: ‘Should it console us somehow / that what looks so like annihilation / is only change?’ The poet demands answers from Empedocles about what is lost and where it goes. Bodies lifted from preserving bogs, still stamped with human character, are no help: the emotional response to such a retrieval suggests that change, by contrast, is not comforting. The final section of the poem becomes an interrogation: where is ‘all that has slipped from mind’, Pugh challenges the philosopher: ‘Show me the sand, Empedocles​ / show me the sand.’ The overall effect is of a richly ironic perception of the present and the ante-rooms of history: Sheenagh Pugh is an acute writer and this is an enjoyable,  highly recommended collection.

Perhaps you’re reading this review on a smartphone at a bus station, in which case you’re one of those celebrated in Afternoons Go Nowhere:

                                                    … They know

the price of gold, what’s happening in Iran

tomorrow’s weather; they scan the world

their faces backlit; they are no spectators

but part of the play, tuned in

to a global exchange …

Where trendier voices might urge us to cast our screens aside in order to capture a more authentic experience of the bus station, urging us towards the visions of eternity attained by Allan Ginsberg in a Greyhound terminal, Pugh celebrates the pulse of information and the new opportunities for engagement in the dead time between one bus leaving and the next arriving. It’s characteristic of a poet who admits to wasting massive amounts of time online and wrote one of the first literary studies of fan fiction, alongside her two novels and nine previous volumes of verse.

Starting off at the bus station (a good place to start, though midway through the book), we have poems going in two directions. Aboard the buses, we have poems of travel and physical experience, such as Pugh’s eight poem ‘Canadian Sequence’ and her continued ruminations on her new home in the Shetland isles. Complimenting these, and interwoven with them, are the smartphone poems, virtual experience gleaned from books, history, and Wikipedia, and given a fresh twist by the poet’s perspective. These are my personal favourites, particularly the medieval poems that open the book. We have a monk whose thoughts break in upon the text of the chilly hagiography he’s copying out and whose illustrations run riot in the margin; a sonnet for Charles VI of France, who believed he was made of glass; and the strange morality of the everyday men set to sack the Palace of Savoy during the Peasant’s Revolt.

No looting was allowed. Walter said,

we are not thieves. Samson did not pocket

the temple vessels. We had never handle

such stuff. I saw men lay velvet

to their cheeks, stroke silk with fingertips

before their knives ripped though it.

‘I have been accused of being “populist” and “too accessible”’, Pugh writes on her website, ‘both of which I hope are true’. They still are: there’s nothing in this latest collection that’s rebarbative or overly obscure, and there’s usually an italicised subtitle to provide a welcome hint. I had to check who Dan Leno and Samuel Butler were; a poem about C.P. Cavafy in Liverpool nearly slipped past my literary radar; and I had to spend some minutes figuring out the identity of the expiring Frenchman in ‘Seascape with dying author’. However, none of this is too onerous in the internet age and 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.

Despite the variation in the material, the collection hangs together remarkably well, with warmth of Pugh’s voice detectable behind every poem. I will never read all five volumes of Konstantin Paustovsky’s autobiography, but it delights me that she has, and has extracted from it the romantic episode that forms her three-poem sequence ‘Lieutenant Schmidt’s Ideal Lady’. I like her strange perspectives on places and stories that are new to me, and it’s compelling the way she varies her free verse with form, not just in ‘La Catalana’, a doggerel ballad of prostitutes on strike, but in the half-rhymed quatrains of ‘The Painter’s Bored Husband’ and the smattering of sonnets across the collection. They’re a record of afternoons well spent, and they’re well worth taking an afternoon of your own to explore them.

Time, in Sheenagh Pugh’s hands, has a tendency to turn gleefully slippery. In Afternoons Go Nowhere, her tenth collection, Pugh turns her poetic sorcery to humanity, history, geology, nature, and the spaces between all those magical things.

Silken strings of words offer up glorious catches: bewildered kings, harangued statues, a lord’s horse, a bored husband building cairns, and monks speculating about saints exhale alongside bus passengers “postponing goodbyes”, not to mention glacial water scooping “a hollow in limestone.” In Pugh’s eyes, it seems, each of these has equal gravitas.

Lit by Pugh’s keen gaze, every plant, stone, animal or person has the potential to grow playful or impatient, coy, attention-seeking, or ashamed. Unexpected characters emerge humming tunes that seem familiar, but which curl with their own original lilt.

In short, Pugh’s poetry unearths those traditionally overlooked, allowing us to experience individual quirks, confusions and unfathomable kindnesses for ourselves. One delicious example is The Offering, in which Bishop Thorlock, who has been charged with restoring a possessed sea-cliff for human use, considerately leaves “one slope unblessed,” for the sole enjoyment of “gannets, puffins and cliff-monsters.”

Pugh imbues her words with consistently infectious affection – displaying an anthropological delight in our idiosyncrasies, as well as a linguistic love that equips her to paint civilisations’ heritage with fresh colours never seen before.

In ‘Airline Pilots’, a deceptively simple clutch of couplets, Pugh analyses the professional nonchalance of pilots’ tones and takes it from a practical necessity to calm anxious passengers to an admission of glory – “I am acquainted with the sun.” Sublime.

Elsewhere, Pugh alights on a moment as yet unsullied by darkness to come, inviting us to be awed by a mother’s love for her infant son, uncaring that in years to come she’ll “order his eyes put out” to assuage a power-thirst stronger than that love. In Pugh’s opinion, it seems, one act cannot, and will not, reduce the worth of the other.

Pugh’s greatest skill lies in her ability to share a passion for details, as in the title poem ‘Afternoons Go Nowhere’, when the seasons change from summer to autumn always comes as a surprises: “Somehow no one is ever quite ready/ for this, as if they half hoped/ time too would let things slide.”

It echoes the heartfelt sentiment of Pugh’s earlier collection Short Days, Long Shadows.

Elsewhere, in ‘Sensory Acquisition’, senses failing with age offer up passages of exquisite beauty, as though diminished eyesight and hearing is editing out the mundane: “Speak of paracetamol; he hears Paris in turmoil. A tame housecoat slips its peg, prowls the shadows, an ocelot.”

Pugh is also a magician when it comes to conjuring a sense of place, spooling out not only views but palpable impressions of the locations she loves, most notably Shetland and Canada. In ‘Quarff Gap’, the focus is on space itself – “Nothing fills the eye”.

It seems that Pugh is intent on training us to marvel in the small miracles we each overlook each day, to follow nature’s rule and allocate to each of those more commonly lauded a gull for a crown, and rather than mourning our losses, to celebrate what they’ve made way for.

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.