Where 'nothing fills the eye'
This contemporary poem describes a unique area of Shetland that looks empty and flat but exudes a rich sense of history
‘Quarff Gap’ by Sheenagh Pugh
A place named for nothing,
a nothing, a space
in a spine of hills,
a great scoop of sky
in a green spoon, a doorway
from east to west.
A place with a past
before history started.
Think the river back,
the giant whose bed
you stand in. It would run
where the skuas* balance
between two hills,
where air pours
in place of water.
Something was here,
now nothing is. Nothing
fills the eye,
bowl-shaped, windblown,
the colour of weather,
salt-flavoured, singular.
Who knew nothing
could be such a landmark?
From the North Sea,
sailing up this coast,
bays blur; nesses* flatten out,
it's hard to tell
townships apart.
But no one can miss
the gap, the emptiness
that signs its name
across landscape, sky,
that draws the fancy
like a window, or rather
the space in a ruined wall
where a window was.
*skuas=large sea birds
*nesses=capes or promontories
What we love about this poem…
We love the paradox of describing an absence, an emptiness, a ‘nothing.’ Pugh gives it shape and substance through metaphor, imagining ‘a great scoop of sky/in a green spoon’, as if this were a land of giants. She also conjures doors, windows, and walls in the empty landscape, as if it were a house. But the poem also allows the nothingness just to be there, to exist, and to be sensed through sound, sight, smell, touch, and even taste— ‘salt-flavoured.’
The word ‘quarff’ (fun to say out loud!), like many Shetland place names, comes from Old Norse, and means ‘bend’. We love the idea that even a place of ‘nothingness’ deserves a brilliant name.
About the Author
Sheenagh Pugh was born in 1950 in Birmingham, lived and worked for many years in Cardiff, and now lives in Shetland. She has published nine collections of poetry and translations, plus a Selected Poems, two novels, and a critical study of fan fiction. She also translates poems from German, French, and Ancient Greek. She studied modern languages at the University of Bristol and taught creative writing at the University of Glamorgan.
Sheenagh has won many awards including the Forward Prize for best single poem of 1998, the Bridport Prize, the PHRAS prize, the Cardiff International Poetry Prize (twice) and the British Comparative Literature Association's Translation Prize. Her poems have been included in several anthologies, notably Poems on the Underground and The Hutchinson Book of Post-War British Poetry. They have also been set to music, have appeared on the trams of Helsinki and the St Petersburg Underground, and have been translated into German, French, Italian, Russian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch.
She writes: ‘I like to use poems to commemorate people and places, sometimes to amuse, to have a go at things I don't like (censorship, intolerance, pomposity) and above all to entertain. I have been accused of being "populist" and "too accessible", both of which I hope are true.’
We are grateful to Sheenagh Pugh for permission to reprint ‘Quarff Gap’ which originally appeared in her collection Afternoons Go Nowhere (Seren, 2014).
You can listen to her reading and discussing the poem (while walking across Quarff Gap itself) on BBC Shetland’s ‘The Lie of the Land’.
To read alongside…
Read Sheenagh’s recommendations below:
"Woak Hill" by William Barnes. https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/woak-hill/ Barnes was a Dorset dialect poet of the 19th century who was brilliant at describing things and people that weren't there - a lack, an absence. In "Woak Hill" he describes a widower moving house and, in his mind, taking his dead wife with him - as he drives his horse and buggy from the old house to the new one, he is "talking/To air at my shoulder". This poem was partly what made me write "Quarff Gap"; I wanted to create that sense of absence. Other poems by Barnes that do much the same are "The Wife A-Lost" and "The Turnen Stile".
Paul Henry's poems about people and relationships that aren't there any more also influenced me, especially "Penllain" from "The Brittle Sea" (Seren, 2010).
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