The Movement of Bodies

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.

Recommended by the Poetry Book Society

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.

"I have long admired Sheenagh Pugh''s work, which manages to combine accessibility with profundity, clarity and sophistication. The Movement of Bodies offers her familiar blend of the historical, the literary and the inimitably quirky... Pugh makes memorable documentaries of life''s surprises and ironies, of human folly juggling ideas and language, but educating us too. Thoroughly recommended."
The London Review Magazine

"Sheenagh Pugh''s work''s accessibility is a feature of the clarity and inevitability with which she can pursue intuitions into territories of luminous significance."
Poetry Review

"The Movement of Bodies is a strong book and virtually everything in it is recommended"
Jim Burns

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. She currently lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Glamorgan, and has won numerous prizes for her work, including the Babel Prize for translation and the ACW Book of the Year in 2000.