Sheenagh Pugh does her poems no favours by leading to the
translations at the back with a closing instruction to creative
writing students called "Tutorial":
"..Good's not good enough.
Play with the line. Turn it around, and see
what happens. Try taking a stress away;
change tense, loosen the rhythm. Shake the words up".

The advice, like Hamlet's to the players, could be
construed as teaching your grandmother to suck eggs, and as a
manifesto of her own practise shows too clearly her own stop
start imagination.

"Open up: look and listen so hard,
it hurts. Taste the frost on the air,
the blood on your tongue."

Whose blood? What frost is on the air, not in the hand or ear that hears crunching?

"Half-alive is too dull
for words; will make no mark on blank paper."

Many of these poems are half alive, capturing the mind for a moment, then letting go. A sequence called "The Arctic Chart" circles around the different and often tragic expeditions to find the North-West passage, then find the remains of lost expeditioners. Many are sketches of individual tempraments, flaring into immediacy in odd images:

"When you saw the winter ice break
with a great, rippling wave, like a carpet
shaken out..."

This is dazzling but has nothing to do with the individual Dr. Kane who elicits the poem, the subject is Pugh's own lesser life and exploration, and the immediacy of the domestic image betrays the fact that she knows nothing of the subject - it only comes alive when translated back to her more prosaic frame. A ballad called "Lady Franklin Bay" is sustained by the rhyme scheme whose narrative drive and plaintives implicity won't allow glitz:

"He lies in the north lady,
where your heart came:
nothing belongs up there
so much as your name."

As a whole, these poems convince most when they describe lost
love - in the Forward Prize winning "Envying Owen Beatty" it is
the desire to kiss the dug up dead youth from the snow, a woman
who hates her lover's smoking because of smoking parents

"dreams now
of drowning her mouth in black unbrushed
hair, acrid and soft as ash."

The simplest and most controlled in its emotion is "Letter":
"Birds set out on their travels, same as ever:
it's nothing to them who'll miss their goodbyes,
written across the sky in small black letters
like your neat script, that will not answer this."

Or the confession of "The Faithful Wife" who thinks
her passion for a gay co-worker doesn't matter till she overhears
his voice asking the time and

"it slammed into my guts. My arms ache,
and I can't breathe for him. I can't breathe."

The translations are also intermittently brilliant. Some
lines can sound like greeting card verse -

"What is the use of laughter
upon the empty wind?
A joke is funny after
you share it with a friend."

Then some achieve a forceful plainness absent in her own work:

"Things happen: life doles out pleasure and pain
at its own liking. I will try to put
a brave face on..."

At her best she takes an incident or character and makes them haunt, like the bridegroom she found in an old diary, who crossed a bridge to buy a ring, met his old flame and married her instead:
"the sweet certainty
that crossing the bridge
will change everything
for better or worse,
and he can't go back."

Her crossings are well described, as are the lovers abandoned, what she's going toward over the bridge may be beyond her grasp.