Sheenagh Pugh

Poet and novelist

Long-Haul Travellers

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Long-Haul Travellers came out in October 2008 from Seren. It does contain poems about "real" sea journeys, notably up the coast of Norway, but also about more nebulous and figurative voyages like, for example, the journeys of those equivocal adventurers Murat Reis and Tristan Jones from one identity to another, and that of Adwaitya the tortoise through several lifetimes of men . Not to mention the longest journey of all, that which the ghost of  "Josephine" makes from death back to life in the mind of her bereaved father.

Long-Haul Travellers was shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Prize  and long-listed for the Wales Book of the Year Prize. 

Here's the cover pic, plus a free sample....                                                                                                                

The Opportune Moment

If you were waiting for the opportune moment, that was it" - Capt Jack Sparrow,  Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl

When you go ashore in that town,

take neither a camera nor a notebook.

However many photographs you upload

of that street, the smell of almond paste 

will be missing; the harbour will not sound

of wind slapping on chains. You will read

notes like "Sami church", later, and know

you saw nothing, never put it where

you could find it again, were never

really there. When you go ashore

in the small port with the rusty trawlers,

there will be fur hawkers who all look

like Genghis Khan on a market stall,

crumbling pavements, roses frozen in bud,

an altar with wool hangings, vessels

like canal ware, a Madonna

with a Russian doll face. When you go

ashore, take nothing but the knowledge

that where you are, you never will be again

                   

"Long-Haul Travellers is a book of nuance and experience, in which each poem goes the distance" - Sarah Wardle, The New Welsh Review

 "Pugh's poetry evinces that fine quality of light which makes you feel while it lasts a special sense of freedom" - W S Milne, Agenda

"The poems have an oblique clarity that is very winning [...]  Long-Haul Travellers is a mature, poised, coherent book of poems" - John Killick, The North

 "... subtle exposure of underlying tensions in our sense of identity" - W N Herbert,  Poetry London

There's also a review on Emma Lee's writing-related blog, here