Short days, long shadows

In this, her twelfth collection, noted poet Sheenagh Pugh steps into a new, northern landscape, the Shetland Islands, with poems steeped in the wilder weathers and views of rugged coastlines, sweeping sea-vistas and the hardy historical characters who have inhabited these lands. There is a lovely pared-down spareness, and elegiac formality to poems like Travelling with Ashes , Staying , and Trondheim: January where the inhabitants appear lost in a strange pink daylight , and in Gardening where White stones are shaped like hearts . The author s characteristic dry humour emerges elsewhere as in Extremeophiles , a paean to bacteria chancers who live without sun. A poet who considers too accessible to be the best sort of compliment, Sheenagh Pugh s work has as much to offer the general reader as it does the specialist, who will admire her artful use of traditional forms.