Sheenagh Pugh Biography

British poet, born in Birmingham, educated at the University of Bristol. Crowded by Shadows (1977), her first collection of poems, established the sceptical levelness of tone and wryly understated wit which characterize much of her work. Her subsequent volumes, in which an increasingly flexible technique is evident, are What a Place to Grow Flowers (1980), Earth Studies and Other Voyages (1983), Beware Falling Tortoises (1980), and Sing for the Taxman (1993); much previously uncollected material appears in her Selected Poems (1990). Her work is notable for its unusual range, which extends from erudite use of historical materials to urgently topical treatments of social and political themes. Prisoners of Transience (1985) are translations of several little-known seventeenth-century German poets.