Sheenagh Pugh's Blog, page 49

You can never have too many pirate books

Review of Pirates of Barbary by Adrian Tinniswood

I thought I had enough pirate books, till I saw this one specifically dealing with the Barbary pirates of Algiers, Tripoli etc. It's well researched and scholarly but also written in a delightfully lively style - see this sardonic little piece on everyone's dream job - not...:

"The governorship of Tangier was not a passport to success. The Earl of Peterborough was recalled to England after 11 months, amidst allegations of corruption and...

Write a poem, educate an orphan

There are umpteen poetry competitions and I don't usually bother flagging them up, cos those who go in for them tend to know about them.

But this is a new one on me, and one that actually aims to do some good. Educating Kenyan Orphans is a charity whose objectives are:

# To advance the education of the children who have been orphaned mostly by AIDS and those who live in poverty in Kenya, by raising funding to buy educational materials [...:]
# In order to relieve the poverty of the orphans and o...

Usual steam coming wearily out of ears....

Look. Your friend died.. And I'm sorry, I really am. I'm sure he was a nice man and to judge by the obituary, he was a talented one.

If you had asked first, I would not in fact have been so callous as to refuse permission for you to read the poem you read at the service. Even though I loathe it and no longer want to be known as its writer. But I would, had I been given the chance, have asked you to use it without quoting my name - if you must include a credit, blame it on that old reprobate An...

And it's only March...

The University of Glamorgan Masters in Writing, which I used to teach on, has always had a fine record in publication and career successes, but this year is turning out to be a bit extra-special. These aren't the only publications and successes this year by any means, but...

In February three novels came out from graduates of the degree:

Mike Thomas's debut, Pocket Notebook

Maria McCann's second, The Wilding

Dan Rhodes' umpteenth, Little Hands Clapping

And what's happened since? Well, Mike has s...

Anthologies and granfalloons

There's nowt more fun than a poetry barney, especially between male poets, who are, in my experience, generally touchier, cattier and more easily wounded than the female variety, and this one on Todd Swift's blog, about a recent anthology, addresses interesting questions of identity; how does someone get to be "British"? But I think the underlying question is rather about what anthologies should be for, and whether there was any point at all in the criteria for this one.

To reprise the quote f...

Reading and writing as craft

I've been reading Prof, Christopher Meredith's inaugural professorial lecture, "Miller's Answer: making, saying and the impulse to write" which has some fascinating things to say about the difference between spoken and written language and the simultaneous perception of language as something "ordinary", with which everyone is born, and "special",crafted in a way that is the reverse of instinctive. He has a lovely anecdote about the painter Degas, one day saying to the poet Mallarmé, "I've had...

Jumping up and down!!!!

Fox 2000 has won a bidding war for the film rights to Brit author Catherine Fisher's young-adult tome "Incarceron," with an eye to spinning the dystopian fantasy into a franchise.

Catherine is one of the most gripping fantasy novelists I know - I don't think of her as a young-adult or children's novelist in particular, cos why should they have all the fun? And while any of her books would film well, Incarceron and its sequel Sapphique should make compulsive viewing.

Here's a writing problem for you...

I've a friend who's written a novel, as yet unpublished (I hope that won't be the case for long because its subject matter is fascinating and curiously little used, given that it affects everyone who'll ever be a parent).

Anyway. This novel centres on a group of young middle-class women in London, brought together by an extremely likely circumstance which I won't go into for fear of spoilers, but suffice to say it's a good way of bringing together women of assorted incomes and professions. It'...

Poets Is Miserable Barstids - How we read

I've been corresponding via facebook recently with a lad who's currently having to study poems by both me and Carol Ann Duffy for AS-level. It's become clear that he and his mates have conceived a poisonous dislike for Duffy's poems, because, he says, the teachers have chosen such "depressing" ones to study. I seem to have escaped lightly, because, though I write at least as many depressing ones as she does, I'm the comparison object in the module and the students can, more or less, choose wh...

Who fancies a love poem for Valentine's then?

I don't do happy ones, though...

Ballad of the Lovesick Traveller


You roll a rizla, and your friends
half-heartedly protest,
but she, ex-smoker that she is,
lights it and holds your wrist.
We fan the acrid smoke away,
she tastes it in your kiss.
And what is that but love, my dear,
when nothing tastes amiss?

She's twenty-five; she wants to dance
and feel the pulsing sound.
You're fifty-four; you smile and shrug
and let her take your hand.
On each young face you read the words
No fool like an old fool.
And wha...