Relinquish

Born in 1968, Meryl Pugh grew up in Wales, New Zealand, East Anglia and the Forest of Dean, where her family settled.

She was educated at Queens' College, University of Cambridge and the Institute of Education, University of London.

After ten years of secondary school teaching, she left the profession in order to spend more time writing.

In 2003, she was selected as a Jerwood /Arvon Young Poet, and was short-listed for the New Writing Ventures Poetry Prize in 2005.

In that same year, she was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship.

She has been published in two anthologies: Entering the Tapestry (eds.

Mimi Khalvati and Graham Fawcett, Enitharmon, 2003) and Reactions 5 (ed.

Clare Pollard, Pen and Ink Press, 2005) and worked with the Museum of London on three creativity projects in prisons.

She works in the Museum and Libraries sector, and is currently studying part-time for an MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Pugh's writing has an unusually tactile quality, and a keen ear for the cadence of the language. Every poem here succeeds in finding the right shape, and feels as if it had been perfectly positioned to reflect and complement its neighbours as the energies build up to the superb title-poem.

The style is lucid and allusive, the voice an inviting mixture of precision and calm authority.

Relinquish is an outstanding first collection. CAROL RUMENS