Meryl Pugh

Biographical note:  Meryl Pugh was born in 1968 and grew up in Wales, New Zealand, East Anglia and the Forest of Dean, where her family settled. Short-listed for the New Writing Ventures Poetry Prize in 2005, she is a Hawthornden Fellow. Her first pamphlet, Relinquish, was published in 2007 by Arrowhead Press. She is a PhD candidate at UEA and lives in Norwich and London, where she teaches creative writing.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844718887
ISBN:  9781844718887
Author:  Meryl Pugh
Title:  The Bridle
Series:  Salt Modern Voices
Product class:  BF
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DCF
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  28-Nov-11
Extent:  44pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  3 mm
Weight:  66 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 6.5
Price:  USD 9.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  The Bridle is concerned with the stories we tell ourselves. Childhood, family, myth — even the arguments and silences between lovers; all are enlisted in its attempt to understand our fleshy, mortal state. This book asks what it means to be human and female and how best to speak of it.

Main description:  The Bridle is concerned with the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the human condition. Childhood, family, memory, myth — even the arguments and silences between lovers — all are enlisted in the bid to come to terms with our fleshy, mortal state. Poetry, here, is the bridle; restraining and shaping emotion, holding and guiding thought, as Pugh grapples with what it means to be human and female and how best to speak of that experience. Whatever the poems’ forms (sonnet or free verse, rhymed or unrhymed, long sequences or short, 6 line fragments), they sing out to the reader directly, urgently, in despair and celebration.

Table of contents:
The Charcoal Bridle
Ecorchée
The Nerve Table
The Singing Door
The Pollard
The Anatomical Waxes
Training Bra
It’s All Good Stuff!
The Observations
Story
Forget-me-nots
A Story about a Story
Lower Road
Small Blue Thing
Magnolia stellata
Eden
Romanesco
Londinia
The Unicorn (Part 1)
Interloper
My Mother’s Mother
The Night Sky
From the Spare Room Again
Spoor
Notes

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Excerpt from book:  

The Singing Door

Come to the singing door and ask your question.
Don’t pace about or try to look behind it.
Don’t look for keyholes, handles, cracks (there are none).

Just stand in front of it, where it has landed
and listen for the voice of someone lost.
At first, you’ll think the sounds you hear are random —

birds foraging for insects in the moss,
rain, the wind through branches — but this is the language
you must learn. So, patience! Listen: a fox

is scratching in its den, a magpie cackles,
a beetle mounts another on a rock.
Give each sound its place and let them gather

until they break like thunder, fade, then stop.
Into this silence (it only sounds like your father)
the door will drop its low, meandering song:

a composite of creatures, plants and weather,
alien and human, strange but known.
Stand your ground as leaves begin to wither,

the sun to set (although it’s not yet noon)
and ice takes hold of tree, small beast and river
for these are the ripened fruit your search has borne.

The door is singing, just as it was bidden,
and if you’d only listen, you would learn
how it can relieve you of your burden

(sorrow, guilt, whatever you have done).
Don’t worry that you seem to have forgotten
which hand you use to write with, your full name,

whether you have pets at home or children
or indeed, the reason why you came.
Look between your feet. A crack has opened

and you must choose which side to stand. Your pain,
which you express so fully, has been noted
but go now, leap the widening chasm, pray —

though you will fail — to make a solid landing,
scrabble for the edge, repeat your prayer,
look down at your feet, half-lost in violet shadow,

look up at your breath, freezing in the air
(watch how it hangs above you, drops and scatters
just as the door shudders and jerks ajar).

Who are you again? It doesn’t matter.
You asked for an end to grief. Here we are.
Yes, ours: the hands you feel around your ankles

pulling, hastening your fall. You hear
the singing door? It has your voice now. Thank you:
you’ve given it so much and now you’re free.

Unpublished endorsement:  Assured yet tender, Meryl Pugh keeps an impressively tight rein on her craft to such an extent we can still hear each poem long after it has galloped off the page.

Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch