In Homescape, Victoria Pugh addresses the loss of her family home and what it held. She writes about relationships, art, the links between the present and the past, her local area and the life she has now. The weird and the everyday are her joy in poems about all sorts of subjects: a peeler crab on a bus, an old-fashioned department store in Reading, a stripy jumper, an old woman sitting on a prom, what it’s like to walk around inside a poem, a deserted village.
Although her themes vary, her aims remain the same: igniting a recognition of shared experience, evoking the ‘emotional tingle’ which lights up inside when a poem touches the body as well as the mind, to consider the human condition with tenderness and concern, and find consolation in our shared humanity.
‘In this wide-ranging collection, Victoria Pugh’s wonderfully sensuous language and imagery bring her poems to vivid life. Colour and sound are invoked throughout, as well as at one point the perfectly conjured sense of smell: “a wood polish scent of Old Drawer”. The tour de force that is “How I Became a Doormat” brings humour and a touch of romantic nostalgia to her own physical situation: “This wretched MS … ” I know from my own experience that Homescape will live in the mind of the reader long after they close the book’ — Susan Utting
‘Victoria Pugh is a very original and imaginative poet who explores connections between the present and the past. Her immediate poems carry a powerful emotional undertow. She often turns to the surreal to explore relationships in depth and she has a distinctive way of connecting the ordinary with the extraordinary’ — Myra Schneider
About the author: Victoria Pugh has lived in Reading for nearly forty years. She was born in London and has lived in various parts of Wales and in the Lake District. Her first collection of poetry, Mrs Marvellous, was published by Two Rivers Press in 2008. A poem from that collection was highly commended and published in the Forward book of poetry 2009. She has been involved with poetry in Reading for many years and her poems have been published widely in magazines. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University. She has worked as a teacher and a trainer, latterly as a teacher of English and as a dyslexia specialist at Reading College.
Victoria Pugh. Paperback, 210 x 135 mm, 74 pages, May 2027.