Penelope Shuttle in conversation with James Byrne, The Wolf issue 10

James Byrne interviews the poet Penelope Shuttle for issue 10 of The Wolf. A short headnote introduces her: born in Staines in 1947, living in Falmouth, Cornwall since 1970, author of six poetry collections since 1980 including a Selected Poems that the Poetry Book Society recommended, as well as novels and, with Peter Redgrove, the prose books The Wise Wound and Alchemy for Women.

The talk opens with her next book, Redgrove's Wife, which gathers poems from 2000 to 2005 and follows A Leaf Out of His Book from 1999. She sketches its range, from love, landscape and weather poems to pieces prompted by the Royal Mail, Matisse and academic footnotes, and says publication was hoped for in 2006 while she changed publisher. Byrne asks whether the newer work is deliberately spare. Shuttle replies that the tapered, visceral manner has always run through her books, and that the new collection sets it beside longer, chunkier poems such as Dukedom.

The middle section concerns Redgrove's standing. She suggests he was ahead of his time rather than out of key with it, an ecological poet before the term was fashionable, whose work on the sacred and the erotic still unsettles English poetry; she cites an essay by Alan Brownjohn. She then describes how two poets shared a working life, taking notebooks to cafes to read and criticise drafts away from the house.

Later answers move to place and method. Falmouth, between estuary and bay, has fed her imagination since she moved there, and good poetry, she says, is a manifestation of human nature as well as the natural world. Walking and yoga keep her attentive to breath, which she treats as the shaping force of a poem. The final questions cover a busy year of festivals and competition judging, the pull of poetry in translation (Lorca, Rilke, Akhmatova) over home-grown verse, whether shamanism fits her work (she links it to the horse that recurs in her collection Adventures With My Horse, and notes that her poems are drafted many times over), and three poems for a desert island: by Denise Levertov, Rilke and Peter Redgrove.

Work

Redgrove's Wife

Author

Penelope Shuttle

In my poetry I give primacy to the breath. For me it is the way the poem breathes that gives it form.

Penelope Shuttle, The Wolf, issue 10