Along the great moon

comes brassbold dog-tired day

looking for a fight

driven and drifting

by the great everything-is-mine moon

what the eye remembers

is a tear is it?

what the ear recalls

the hand that stung it?

what the street remembers

isn’t true?

(that’s true)

along the great moon

comes the bus brandishing

its red tongue

the river standing for nonsense

The Shard

lovely lovely loverly Shard

goal of all urban climbers

(Alain Robert’s nabbed from the building

before he…)

The Shard

glass mast of tallest sailing ship

steeple-singer

jumped-up one

vertical thinker

multi-use Shangri-la

moon’s bitch

Along the great moon

Published in ‘In The Snowy Air’ (Templar Poetry, 2014)

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Round we go

the bus and I

Gladstone giving us

his stern twinkly blessing

on a little summer

come from nowhere

and nothing

dear of it

to kiss-better the long

and beastly winter wounds

the british library

stretching out

behind us

a great basking lion -

the library knows

many hands many minds

make light work even

of four subterranean floors

of incunabula

only now and then

does a scholar or a volume

hit the bonk -

and from ground level up

the zillion books of life

even the most gadfly of tomes

are sleeping or waking

in their alphabetical lofts

St Pancras

blushing nearby

only the river

keeping his cool

the river

the bus

and me

British Library

Published in ‘In The Snowy Air’ (Templar Poetry, 2014)

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In The Snowy Air

By Penelope Shuttle. Published by Templar Poetry, 2014

‘In The Snowy’ Air is the second iOTA Shot Award winning pamphlet launched at the Templar Poetry

Keats House readings. The poems mark a change of direction in Penelope Shuttle's work – shifting

from elegy to explorations of cities – both actual and metaphoric.

The significant impetus for this sequence of poems is a guided walk led by poet Tom Chivers on a cold

February afternoon in 2013. Tom took a group along the route of the long-buried ‘lost’ Walbrook River,

from Shoreditch to its outflow in the Thames near Canon Street Station This walk in sleet and icy

winds inspired the title poem —'In the Snowy Air'. London is part and parcel of Penelope Shuttle's

life - as a teenage poet she heard Pablo Neruda at The Round House, and went to the first Poetry

Internationals at South Bank.

Cornwall Contemporary Poetry Festival

Will be held in Falmouth, from Thursday 22

to Sunday 25 November 2018

Penelope Shuttle has made her home in Cornwall

since 1970 and the county’s mercurial weather and

rich history are continuing sources of inspiration.

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