Sheenagh Pugh - Selected Poems

Sheenagh is serious. About whatever and whoever in the world she chooses to care for! Could be Geordie boys carrying their future hopes and meagre baggage, on the London train, the  post-apocalyptic universe, her travels to Iceland, snooker... Warmth sits alongside conceptual and imaginative breadth, here is someone who cares about the environment and would like to see us husband it better.

She has also written a book about 'fan-fic' where writers borrow characters from other writers and extend their fictional lives.There is a subgenre called slashfic; according to wiki it is often tales where sci-fi icons are placed into same-sex pairings. Inventive stuff and it's good to see a former university teacher of Creative Writing who is unafraid to venture into territory scorned by traditionalists.

My favourite in the selection is Night Thoughts, Edward Lear's make-believe soliloquy where he becomes 'Athene's solemn dull old Owl' struggling to articulate his inter-species fancy for a creature with bright eyes and potentially lethal claws. Fanfic of a kind, it encompasses and extends the notion we have of Edward the diffident, slightly sad humorist. I  hear and see him in his nightshirt by the window.and I love the tentative creative optimism at the end.

I have yet to read her fiction but she has a chapter from Folk Music on her website. Set in an imaginary, but non 'fanstasy' land it's about language, custom and who is allowed to talk to whom. Very much the same voice as her poetry, inventive, well-crafted, writing that engages the reader emotionally; I want to read it.