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."