Penelope Shuttle is one of Britains leading poets. This selection
- drawn from ten collections published over three decades plus new work
- shows both her consistency of voice & her energised openness to language & 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 Picassos view that If you know exactly what youre going to do whats 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 & with her husband Peter Redgrove remembering their shared past with love wit paradox exasperation & a lightness of heart towards ageing & sorrow. With these poems Shuttle concludes her triptych of mourning for Redgrove & ceases to weep on the worlds shoulder. If a poets 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 lifes difficulties & a guide through widening regions of love & motherhood. Her themes range widely: personal life that part of our secret working mind which we call dreams the landscape of Cornwall myth & fairytale. & she has a passionate awareness of the many ways
- sacred & profane comic sensuous & joyful
- in which we sustain ourselves through poetry combining a provocative intelligence with uninhibited emotional power.