Will you walk a little faster?

By Penelope Shuttle

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 both with active and meditative thinking in order to establish 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’.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Jul 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9781780373546

Penelope Shuttle

Penelope Shuttle has lived in Cornwall since 1970, and is the widow of the poet Peter Redgrove. Her retrospective, Unsent: New & Selected Poems 1980-2012, drew on ten collections published over three decades plus new work, from The Orchard Upstairs (1980) to Sandgrain and Hour-glass (2010). This was followed by Will you walk a little faster? (2017). Her 2006 collection Redgrove’s Wife was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and T.S. Eliot Prize. She has also published five novels, and is co-author with Peter Redgrove of two prose works, The Wise Wound and Alchemy for Women. She lives in Falmouth.

Book preview

PENELOPE SHUTTLE

WILL YOU WALK A LITTLE FASTER?

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 both with active and meditative thinking in order to establish 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’.

‘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-maker. One senses that she has her life perfectly in tune with her poetry, so that it registers the slightest variation in her state of being. In this sense, the narratives of emotional, erotic and maternal love that can be traced through these poems collocate into the drama of a life lived in the full flood of being’ – Gerard Woodward, TLS

COVER PAINTING

The Swan, no.1. Group IX by Hilma af Klint (1914-15)

No.1, GROUP IX, SERIES SUW/UW

OIL ON CANVAS, 150 x 150cm

© THE HILMA AF KLINT FOUNDATION

PENELOPE SHUTTLE

Will You Walk

a Little Faster?

For my family and my friends

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am indebted to the following journals, e-journals and anthologies in which some of the poems in this collection first appeared: Artemis, Best British Poetry 2015 (Salt Publishing, 2015), Hwaet! 20 Years of Ledbury Poetry Festival (Bloodaxe Books/Ledbury Poetry Festival, 2016), Ink Sweat and Tears, Magma, Her Wings of Glass, Ploughshares, Poem, Rewiring Histories, Southbank London, Stony Thursday, The New Humanist, The Dark Horse, The Manhattan Review, The Poetry Review, The Rialto, and The Yellow Nib.

Some of the poems in this collection first appeared in the pamphlet In the Snowy Air (Iota/Shots, Templar, 2014).

I am grateful for a grant from the Arthur Welton Foundation to assist in the completion of this collection.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

My Life

Hvallator

Quiet Year

Demons talk in the air

Summer has no lover

The Penelopes

Chagall

Prayer Diary

Will You Walk a Little Faster?

Heart / I think of

‘Knowledge’

Encounter at the Shrine

Quiet Street

Walking the Walbrook

The table at Leacroft

Major Titov Orbits the Earth

Modis

Anchor

Tales

I often think

As I fell

On the ceiling

Streets and their childhoods

Along the great moon

In the snowy air

Easy Street

My father promised me a sword

The Same Coat

Carry

My Arthurian Heart

Early

Costa / Henleaze

little monday

Both Hearts

London, December

Dear Shard,

City wakes

Poor London

In my heart

O blinde Augen

Little Bus

Passages

What to do about the heart?

Sleeping the sleep

Knights

Gurney

Might

The hour sees me

British Library

Fools Day

Waitrose

Shardology

Dug-up roads

I took a holiday from my heart

Heart what more

Girls in Bristol

Shardologist

Osmium

New Ceramics Galleries

Bitch

We or I

lol

Opposite

Alone

Maybe

Heart

NOTES

About the Author

Copyright

My Life

My Life,