Will You Walk a Little Faster?
Published in ‘Will You Walk a Little Faster?’ (Bloodaxe Books, 2017)
I speed over Folly Bridge
like Alice
I look both ways
before crossing Speedwell Street
I’m not
as you see
an official guided walking tour
Like Fair Rosamund
I quickstep down Rose Place
like swift Alice
I skip across St Aldate’s
the brainbox city
huffing and puffing in my ear
I’m not hurrying off
to visit a dozen harpsichords
or the church
where William Morris was married
or to see the remains of a dodo
I plan to read
not one
of the six million books
in The Bodleian
or admire a single dreamy spire
or stand in sombre silence
on the spot
where Latimer
Mortimer and Ridley
were roasted alive on god’s turnspit
because I’m heading straight
for the heart
of this leather-
where I’ll find
panaceas of lavender
penny-
medicinal oak-
daffodil and milk-
like the porpoise not the snail
I’m walking a little faster
waltzing like Rosamund the Fair
and Little White Alice
through the wards and waiting rooms
of The Physic Garden
earthy source of tincture and tisane
the help-
who wears a green coat
not a white
don’t you agree?
My Life, I can’t fool you,
you know me too well,
I’m sad of myself,
days live me in vain,
you test me
but bin my answers,
you’re so busy, so tired,
evenings in the glass,
drink them, My Life,
but you won’t,
driving your bargains
of years gone by,
promising me
this and that till
the walls are spells,
the roof’s a star,
and
I seal the hour
in a tear,
a mortal tear,
I know you so well,
My Life, not at all
My Life
Published in ‘Will You Walk a Little Faster?’ (Bloodaxe Books, 2017)
Will You Walk a Little Faster?
By Penelope Shuttle. Published by Bloodaxe Books, May 2017
Penelope Shuttle’s new 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 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-
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?’ is Penelope Shuttle’s first new book-
retrospective, ‘Unsent: New and Selected Poems 1980-
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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