Description:
Poems of memory and imagination whose themes include parenting, grief, nature, emotional recovery and connections to the past.
Review Quotes:
'The capacious and playful latest from Shuttle (Lyonesse) offers twin poles of memory and imagination, taking place in part among the scenes, recollections, and visions of childhood [...] She captures the blending of love and loss, of personal grief and environmental anxiety, that comes with growing up [...] Quietly witty and slyly allusive, this dispenses poignant reflections on the poet's personal history.' - Publishers Weekly, on History of the Child
'Shuttle's style is both spare and vivid: the lines are often short, the language accessible [...] Shuttle's language often evokes shades of the folkloric, referencing myth, fable and pagan history. The titular child is a faerie child, more mischievous, shape-shifting and malevolent than sweet and charming, more Grimm's fairy tales than bedtime-cosy [...] Shuttle leaves us with a mercurial being, and a mercurial collection, best read, in my experience at least, in a sort of 'eyes half-shut' way, where meaning and connection are left to find their own shape in the reader's mind.' - Diana Cant, The Alchemy Spoon, on History of the Child
'Playful, mercurial, and poignant, Shuttle's collection understands childhood as the first country of poetry, where language enchants, deceives, and saves us by turns.' - Ali Choudhary, Newcastle Poetry Festival blog, on History of the Child
On Lyonesse:
'... a singular, arresting and moving book... two collections in one, hinged by a theme of loss. Lyonesse is Cornwall's mythical kingdom - its Paradise Lost... It is this kingdom that has fired - watered - Shuttle's imagination and produced an extraordinary flow of work... Shuttle's Lyonesse is fresh, clear and convincing. It gives grief geography, an address. I believe in its direct dispatches from a submerged front line.' - Kate Kellaway, The Observer, Poetry Book of the Month for July 2021
'Shuttle uses these threads of history to craft a world rich with everyday colour, but, like ours, ultimately dominated by the threat of environmental change... haunting and atmospheric poems... a deeply moving collection.' - Maggie Wang, Poetry Wales, on Lyonesse
'... Penelope Shuttle, in her wonderfully clarifying Lyonesse, paints a picture of mythic lands submerged under seas and the loss, personal and environmental, that follows.' - Rishi Dastidar, The Guardian (Best poetry books of 2021)