The poems in Meryl Pugh's first collection, Natural Phenomena, have a beguiling musicality. I was struck in reading by the timbre of the words; the ways in which sound carries meaning even when referential meaning is elusive... The book seems to be saying ‘get over yourself’, responding to a particular worldview that centres human life by showing us how expansive our world truly is.
Kayo Chingonyi, PBS Guest Selector

Poetry from these isles often displays a peculiarly British preoccupation with writing about nature as a raison d'etre from the poetry itself, but Pugh's poetry, like Alice Oswald's, is distinctive because it layers and complicates meaning beyond a mere rumination on the bucolic.
Dzifa Benson, Poetry School

These startling, hybrid poems are like the “van doors opening on different/ landscapes, different times of day” (Trick or Treat); dancing between the drawl of overhead planes, day-time deliveries and the dumpster to much deeper reflections about the ephemerality of life. With this enchanting collection, Pugh will transform your experience of walking down an empty alleyway, where even the crumpled caress of a crisp packet suddenly becomes meaningful beneath the street-light’s glare.
Jade Cuttle, Magma

This collection reverberates with overlapping waves of physical detail of the things we miss a thousand times a day, contrary thoughts, and passages that become haphazard, twisted, hardscrabble, ingrowing. What is most remarkable about Natural Phenomena is its one-pointedness, how the author brings it all together. The sheer sweep of this book, and Pugh’s obsessive control of every single sound and image, endures because it unifies, finds fatbergs and smoke-filled cafes kindred with greenbelt, river, tree, sky. I mean, just listen to this exquisite hoard, the first line of the book: ‘Ash grotto, rain hill, fallen night labyrinth; / demolished Palace, diminishing; / remember-ruin, ripped, deface; / repeat in slow motion your razed / echo.’ We are our attention; make it count.
Will Barrett, Poetry School Books of the Year