Right from the start, Penelope Shuttle lets us know she’s on thin ice. The only consolation is that she may be in
a place where, by admitting all she does not know, she can at last make a fresh beginning:
My Life, I can’t fool you,
you know me too well,
I’m sad of myself,
days lived in vain,
you test me
but bin the answers . . .
I know you so well,
My Life, not at all (9)
A poet at odds with life is hardly news, of course. In his poem, “The Lesson for Today,” Robert Frost said he had
“a lover’s quarrel with the world.” Yet, in the course of these 66 poems—her fourteenth collection—Shuttle
expresses a sense of alienation that seems to go beyond a mere “quarrel.” She describes a world in which we
cannot be entirely sure that we have fully experienced or accurately remembered anything, except perhaps our
hunger for meaning and communication. The only other certainty is that our days are numbered:
I can’t bide my time forever
so I glance at my life
as it goes by
lived and unlived
strange
skimped
dipped in time
where I’m the day’s watcher (54)
It’s easy to overlook how effortlessly Shuttle establishes her distinctive voice, which she has learned to balance
on a razor’s edge, so that single syllables like “strange” and “skimped” and “dipped” can resonate. Sometimes she
uses assonance, as she does here, or rhyme, to link ideas, but her acoustic effects never draw attention to
themselves. Yet the sound of the lines is of prime importance to her. Her main organizing unit, she has said,
could not be simpler: “For me it is the way the poem breathes that gives it form.”
And somehow the fact that the ground seems to be shifting under her doesn’t prevent Shuttle’s being brisk
and breezy, if the mood strikes her. In the title poem, the speaker takes us darting through the streets of Oxford:
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
Like swift Alice, indeed; the poem takes its title from “The Lobster Quadrille” by Oxonian Lewis Carroll. But
the speaker isn’t headed to the Oxford destinations most often associated with “the brainbox city” (Shuttle’s
choice of words is one of her chief delights) but to “The Physic Garden”—Britain’s oldest botanical garden—
where potent herbal remedies grow. The poem’s concluding lines affirm the healing
power of “the help-
of nature/who wears a green coat/not a white/don’t you agree?”
Born in Staines, Middlesex, on the western fringe of Greater London, in 1947, Shuttle is one of the most
prolific and widely discussed British poets of her generation. She started writing early, publishing a novella when
she was only 20. Her first poetic models were the British-
that she read in translation: Rilke, Akhmatova and Lorca. If Shuttle had any English forebears, they were
Traherne and Blake, not Wordsworth and Larkin.
At 23 she married Peter Redgrove, a former classmate of Ted Hughes at Cambridge who, at 39, had established
himself as a major voice in British poetry. The couple settled on the coast of Cornwall—the westernmost county
in England—where they spent 33 years living and working together, both producing poetry that began with a
keen awareness of the natural world and later incorporated ideas from Jungian psychology.
After Redgrove’s death in 2003, Shuttle wrote a series of poems about their relationship that appeared in her
2006 collection, Redgrove’s Wife, and the book wasshortlisted for two of the nation’s most prestigious poetry
awards: the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize. Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, novelist Gerard
Woodward described her as “one of our most compellingly sensuous poets . . . Shuttle is a poet of immense reach,
both in the range of her subject matter and the breadth of her language. She is both an acute observer and an
inventive fiction-
country’s online Poetry Archive, making them available to a global audience.)
In this new book, Shuttle is just as likely to take us through the streets of London, Oxford, and Bristol as to the
Cornish coast. Perhaps solitude is less desirable as one gets older. Nonetheless, whether set among city crowds
or not, Shuttle’s latest work is intent on unraveling the real from the illusory in all kinds of circumstances:
wondering why the heart is still “no open book” after all these years (22); watching the spirits of hospital patients
struggle to free themselves from life, as surgeons try to keep them here (40); and warning herself about the
dangers of sinking too far into the past on a visit to her childhood town (41).
Her style has been pared down a bit—her lines tend to be shorter these days—but her poems are as playful and
emotionally direct as ever, despite the existential doubts that many of them raise. And, as the collection
progresses, there are moments when Shuttle’s confidence in the power of incantation returns, as though it had
never been called into question. “O Blinde Augen” (the reference to “blind eyes” comes from Wagner’s Tristan
and Iseult) is addressed to Peter:
My voice
my voice alone
will touch you
from crown to heel . . .
My voice will tend you
like a child raised by wolves
All this is true
and now
I will tell you one of my lies
Beloved
as I used to
and you always understood (66)
But those moments of assurance coexist with others, many of them during sleepless nights, when “the world’s a
long way off/a radio too faint to hear” (54) and the line between wakefulness and dreaming is fluid. Then
untethered quiet can suddenly open onto other realities:
But sometimes
on a night like this
there’s so much silence in the silence
my childhood flings its arms around me
or runs me along a hallway
hung with swords and sabres
or I’m carrying the past somewhere
in a jeweled goblet filled to the Wagnerian brim
with blood-
I mustn’t spill one drop
nor take one sip
till I’ve carried the goblet to safety
wherever that may be
and my dad dear dad can’t save me now
from all this waking and sleeping can he? (78)
With this book, Shuttle has carried that goblet—full of the past’s recurring confusions and tentative redemptions
—into the light, bringing us the kind of poems that only a long life, deeply lived and bravely imagined, can yield.
Review by Frank Beck
Will You Walk a Little Faster? review by The Manhattan Review
Posted by The Manhattan Review, 16 June 2018
Will You Walk a Little Faster? review by The Poetry Society
Posted by The Poetry Society, 30 March 2018
“My life, I can’t fool you, / you know me too well” begins the speaker in the opening poem of Penelope Shuttle’s
latest collection, a book that takes its title from the entreaty at the heart of contemporary life. And if the world
around us seems always to be saying “hurry up”, then this book exhorts its readers to slow down from time to
time as well. So we have poems like ‘My Life’, quoted above, in which the speaker is in conversation with their
own life which has become a person with a deep insight into the speaker’s personality. Elsewhere this same
focus on gaining perspective is reflected in a number of poems looking back, we assume, to childhood:
My father
of the sleety air
my father of his silence
his sword of stardust
and ash
as years go by as if he’d never been
(‘My father promised me a sword’)
The wonders of childhood are here in words such as “stardust” and in the speaker’s viewpoint; the father is “of”
the air, a magical being drawn from the elements. That these wonders give way eventually is the poem’s main
propositional content but this poem is a good example of how Shuttle’s poems say things. The lineation favours
a fluid, improvisational rhythm over a more fixed pattern and there is a lot of space in Shuttle’s poems. This
serves to fix an image in the mind and complicate and qualify that image as the poem unfolds. So, even though
the end of the poem is expected and offers no new epiphany, the manner of getting there forces the reader to
be present as they read, following clause after clause until the full picture is clear. In the process of reading the
reader takes on the feeling of wonder that a child might have when trying to make sense of the adult world. This
lends Shuttle’s poems a liveliness that belies their focus on what is lost to time or the process of looking back
into a life. Indeed the presentation of these poems in this way adds an idiosyncratic aspect to what in the hands
of another poet might be a plainer, less nuanced, poem.
This fluid lineation is a hallmark of this book and contributes to an overall feeling that Shuttle is in perfect
control of her material even when the speakers falter:
and I’m getting closer
and closer
to you
despite what people tell me
is the otherwise
(‘I often think’)
but it can’t be done
this looking back
(‘Streets and their childhoods’)
Taken together these two passages are emblems of the book as a whole. On the one hand the impulse behind
the poems is to address mortality, to face the passage of time and set the contemporary moment in context,
and on the other hand there is a sense that looking back in order to do this might be a way of avoiding what is
happening now. It is difficult not to align the speaker in ‘I often think’ with Shuttle, since we know of the loss
to which she has returned often in her work, the death of her partner Peter Redgrove. Whether the speaker is or
isn’t the poet, what we know, outside of the poem, suggests that Shuttle has insight into what the poem contains.
Given this information the poem becomes an exploration of the ways in which the dead stay with us, how we
think of them and hold them in our bodies. This gives the words quoted in the passage above a dual resonance
as both an expression of grief and perhaps of relief, also. There is an intimacy to a word like “closer” which
for a moment takes us away from thoughts of mortality to dwell on what closeness means; the overlap of two
different people forming a unity. While there is a hardness to the sentiment expressed in the latter passage
quoted above, the book attempts what “can’t be done” all the same and it is this that is one of its most emphatic
statements: just because a thing cannot be done, that’s not to say there’s nothing interesting in the attempt.
The Poetry Society
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.
Copyright © 2018 Penelope Shuttle | Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Site Map | Site Update 06.10.18
