Penelope Shuttle – författare

Penelope Shuttle's collection explores cities (London, Bristol) on foot and via inward exploration, drawing on architecture, history and personal memory. These are poems drawn from the flipside of experience, undermining and rebuilding syntax in order to precipitate language, and, in the main, abjuring punctuation. The poems also engage with inward exploration where both active and meditative thinking seek a vulnerable and temporary equilibrium; poems more interested in framing questions than arriving at answers. The volatile and tactile realities and delusions of being in the world direct much of the language's traffic here; there's a commingling of sadness and wry humour in Shuttle's travels through our physical and metaphysical worlds. Pared-back imagery and lyric purpose are embodied here throughout in the work of a poet who agrees with Ekbert Faas's comment: 'as soon as you have a new syntax, you have a new way of breathing, and as soon as you have that you have a new consciousness'. Will You Walk a Little Faster was Penelope Shuttle's first new book-length collection after her Bloodaxe retrospective, Unsent: New & Selected Poems (2012), and was published on her 70th birthday.

The submerged land of Lyonesse was once part of Cornwall, according to myth and the oral tradition, standing for a lost paradise in Arthurian legend, but now an emblem of human frailty in the face of climate change. And there was indeed a Bronze Age inundation event which swept the entire west of Cornwall under the sea, with only the Scilly Isles and St Michael’s Mount left as remnants above sea-level. Lyonesse was also Thomas Hardy’s name for Cornwall where Penelope Shuttle has lived all her adult life, always fascinated by the stories and symbolic presence of Lyonesse.After seeing the Scilly Isles from a small plane at a low altitude – flying over the Wolf Lighthouse ­– and then visiting the recent Sunken Cities exhibition at the British Museum, imagination and memory played their part in joining the Lyonesse dots together for her, prompting what she calls ‘a spontaneous inundation of approaches to the theme, images, soundings of Lyonesse’. As she writes in a preface to this book: ‘The universality of loss, both of physical cities and of the human experience erased from the record, enhanced the resource of Lyonesse in my writing. Lyonesse is a place of paradox. It is real, had historical existence. It is also an imaginary region for exploring depths. It holds grief for many kinds of loss… The poems seek re-wilding of a city where human loss interconnects with mythic loss; myth is rooted in the real.’The second part of this book – New Lamps for Old ­– is a collection of poems she needed to write in coming up for air from the watery depths of Lyonesse, to find ways to begin again, to find meaning in life after bereavement. The ‘old lamps’ of a former life have been extinguished, leaving darkness. Her challenge was to find ‘new lamps’ to illuminate and give meaning to life. Lyonesse is a fluid magical world. The poems of New Lamps for Old are concerned with earth, air and fire. Both collections share allegiance with the fifth element, the spirit.

History of the Child is a highly evocative exploration of childhood, memory, and imagination, blending personal and historical perspectives. The book’s themes include parenting, grief, nature, emotional recovery and connections to the past, guided by the idea of childhood as a transformative and rebellious space.The first of its four sections features poems about Katherine of Aragon, the Vestal Virgins, Stanley Spencer and Wallace Stevens, with a focus on grief, nature, and animals. ​The second, Book of Lullabies, steps closer to the theme of the child, with poems about memory, inwardness, climate change, sexuality in older age, and the natural world. ​The third part, History of the Child, is a journey back to Penelope Shuttle's own childhood, blending personal memories with imagined perspectives to explore psychological crises, emotional recovery, and the traumas of childhood. ​ It introduces an ‘alternative girl child self’, inspired by Persian legends, by her late husband Peter Redgrove’s dream of such a girl (‘my death, and she is my soul’), and by a friend’s fanciful wish. The culminating fourth section is a playful sequence about a little table, inspired by her mother and her childhood. ​ The table symbolises connection to her mother, who lived to be 100 years old, and their shared history. ​Penelope Shuttle's History of the Child is guided by themes of memory, imagination, foreboding, magic, history and humour, and seeks to articulate the essence of ‘being’ through fiery language and elemental imagery. ​ She draws inspiration from Donald Winnicott’s concept of the ‘potentive space’ where play, fantasy and reality intersect.

Penelope Shuttle is one of Britain's leading poets. This selection - drawn from ten collections published over three decades plus new work - shows both her consistency of voice and her energised openness to language and to life. Adventurous, searching, interested in the luminous instant of reality that dwells in the perpetual now of the poem, Penelope Shuttle is a poet who clearly shares Picasso's view that 'If you know exactly what you're going to do, what's the point of doing it?' Not for nothing was one of her books titled Adventures with My Horse. The new poems of Unsent are communications to and with her husband Peter Redgrove, remembering their shared past with love, wit, paradox, exasperation and a lightness of heart towards ageing and sorrow. With these poems Shuttle concludes her triptych of mourning for Redgrove, and ceases 'to weep on the world's shoulder'. If a poet's work is her personal experience of the universe then this book takes us deep into that Shuttle-verse. In earlier collections her concerns are with language as a safety net from life's difficulties and a guide through widening regions of love and motherhood. Her themes range widely: personal life, that part of our 'secret working mind' which we call dreams, the landscape of Cornwall, myth and fairytale. And she has a passionate awareness of the many ways - sacred and profane, comic, sensuous, and joyful - in which we sustain ourselves through poetry, combining a provocative intelligence with uninhibited emotional power.

The Terrors of Dr Treviles is the story of a vocation and a quest. The hero, Gregory Treviles, is a doctor whose healing gift is a terrifying and vivid imagination. His quest is to explore wherever his images lead and to discover in so doing the real use of these bizarre energies; the question he asks himself is 'And whom does this Grail serve?' His quest becomes entwined with the lives of his brilliant red-headed stepdaughter Robyn, a molecular biologist who is also a witch; of another doctor, Brid Hare, who hides a secret she believes is shameful; and the deathly life of Trevile's deceased wife, Mamie. The energy liberated by Trevile's imagination changes all these lives, and involves a foolish saintly clergyman, Alex Bodkin, and many other creatures, such as blood-magic, slapstick comedy, Laurel and Hardy, Satan, and the University of Cornwall. The Terrors of Dr Treviles is a romance of Science and the Supernatural; of ordinary but gifted people exploring the dark sides of their gifts in order to bring them into the light. The book also contains an introduction by the late Brian Louis Pearce.'Peter Redgrove and Penelope Shuttle are a combined writing force who also greatly enrich fiction in The Terrors of Dr Treviles. I can't pluck from the wholeness of their book who contributed what, but altogether it has a rejoicing openness that is remarkable.' (The Times) 'genuine imaginative originality and verbal power' (The Guardian) Peter Redgrove (1932-2003) worked in several interlinked fields: as a poet, novelist, playwright, and in psychological practice. He believed creative, psychological and scientific work are aspects of the same common study, and his insights are profound, illuminating and constantly exciting. He received many awards during his life and was especially honoured by receiving the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1996. Penelope Shuttle has lived in Cornwall since 1970 and is the widow of Peter Redgrove. Her 'Selected Poems' appeared in 1998 and her collection 'A Leaf Out Of His Book' in 1999, both of which were Poetry Book Society Recommendations. A new collection, 'Redgrove's Wife', was recently published.

A mysterious murder is committed aboard a luxury liner; suspicion of guilt spreads among the passengers; a gold watch is found ticking away inside the death-wound; the lives of those involved are changed by their closeness to a violent death, even after the apparent murderer has been discovered. 'The Glass Cottage' is an unusual mystery story that takes the reader into strange byways of emtion, and introduces them to many odd and memorable characters: the mad professor, the widow who talks with Goddess, the perverted ship's doctor, the poet interested in menstruation, the actor, the lover, the immensely freckled psychologist, the ship's spirit, the murdered girl and, not least, the great liner itself, the S.S. Messenger. The novel comes with a new introduction by co-author Penelope Shuttle. 'The Glass Cottage is full of marvellous writing, especially where concrete if esoteric experience is described.' The Listener 'Ablaze with fantastic, self-propogating ideas, strange dimensions, absurdities - a rewarding novel for all but the timidest readers.'(The Birmingham Post) Peter Redgrove (1932-2003) worked in several interlinked fields: as a poet, novelist, playwright, and in psychological practice. He believed creative, psychological and scientific work are aspects of the same common study, and his insights are profound, illuminating and constantly exciting. He received many awards during his life and was especially honoured by receiving the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1996. Penelope Shuttle has lived in Cornwall since 1970 and is the widow of Peter Redgrove. Her 'Selected Poems' appeared in 1998 and her collection 'A Leaf Out Of His Book' in 1999, both of which were Poetry Book Society Recommendations. A new collection, 'Redgrove's Wife', was recently published.

‘alas, alas for everythingwe lost on the Heath’Criss-crossed with desire-lines and flight paths, Penelope Shuttle and John Greening’s Heath is a wild chorus of poems written in call and response across Hounslow Heath. Through bramble, furze and over wild tracks, we explore the run-out grooves of a rapidly vanishing edgeland that may soon go under the tarmac of the proposed third runway at Heathrow. This is eco-poetry beautifully realised and retold in the form of a contemporary fable, straying from the known routes into the borderlands between the human, natural and the supernatural.