Short Days, Long Shadows - Softcover

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.

Sheenagh Pugh is known to thousands of poetry readers for 'Sometimes', her much anthologised 'poem on the underground' and for her Selected Poems, a set text in schools. Sheenagh has published nine collections of poetry and translations plus a Selected Poems and a sort of mini-Selected, two novels and critical study of fan fiction.

She used to lecture in Creative Writing at the University of Glamorgan, and has won numerous prizes for her work, including the Babel Prize for translation and the Arts Council of Wales' Book of the Year in 2000. For more information about Sheenagh Pugh visit her website www.sheenagh.webs.com and her writing blog at www.sheenaghpugh.livejournal.com