Sheenagh Pugh

In 2009 Seren published my Later Selected Poems, which contains work from five post-1990 collections, Sing for the Taxman, Id's Hospit, Stonelight, The Beautiful Lie and The Movement of Bodies. There was a launch at Waterstones, The Hayes, Cardiff on 16th September - see the photo on the right, which shows me signing a copy for the far more famous writer Catherine Fisher!

You can read sample poems from the book on my blog and at Michelle McGrane's blog Peony Moon, but here's another:

 

  The Navigator Loses the Sea                                    ( William Dampier, 1652-1715)

   

Thirty years ago, he wrote the book

of these seas: two hundred years later,

 

they'll still be using it.  Now he sails

as pilot to Woodes Rogers, back on the roads

 

and channels he once charted, an old man

looking out from the rail, and nothing he sees

 

is at all familiar.  He can't find

the safe route to Juan Fernandez;

 

he's misplaced the Galapagos.  They ask

about Butung.  No, I was never there.

 

Later, below, he finds it in his book;

he spends a lot of time learning the names

 

and places that have slipped from his mind,

hoping to bluff the captain a bit longer

 

A navigator who has lost the sea.

In the Cape Verdes, he reads of salt pans,

 

vast and silver, and his own excitement

at the great birds, more than he could count,

 

wherever he looked.  "They were like a wall

of new red brick."  He stares at the word,

 

its arbitrary, meaningless letters,

wondering what flamingos look like.