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The Literary Desk · Review · Issue 13

Redgrove's Wife by Penelope Shuttle, reviewed in The Wolf

James Byrne · Penelope Shuttle · Peter Redgrove

James Byrne takes Redgrove's Wife as Penelope Shuttle's ninth collection and arguably her most important, her first with Bloodaxe after a career of twenty-five years. The poems were written between 2000 and 2005 and form an elegy; the title refers to the poet Peter Redgrove. Byrne reads the book as an unusual grief map, because Shuttle tends to objectify loss and to look for ways to turn death into a renewal of life.

The early poems give weight to everyday objects and rituals marked by absence: discarded shoes, a spider's persistent industry, a jug of water with its own lustrous turmoil. Byrne picks out the opening poem 'Songs' for its quick, concrete imagery and its use of the natural world to unlock mourning, and 'To Be Whispered' for insisting on open air, away from the house. He then turns to 'Missing You', a sequence of twenty-four poems and the most exposed, autobiographical part of the book. Its repetitions suggest the cycles of grief and the poems are brave, often addressing Redgrove directly, but Byrne finds the sequence a little overlong and not every poem a winner. Brand names in 'Missing You #2' and 'January x 2' strike him as a distraction, comparable to a fizzy-drink tin filling the frame in a film noir.

The collection achieves more, in his view, when it draws the enigmatic and ethereal into the natural world and reaches across rivers and continents. 'Totality' and 'The Bat of Totality', two parts of the 'Eclipse x 4' sequence, rank high among the book's best. He also praises poems that recast the months of the year, quirky list poems on post-office regulations and footnotes, and apocalyptic weather poems such as 'The Glimpse'. 'Azucar' is noted for its subtle eroticism and trademark audacity.

Byrne closes by saying the book shows Shuttle's dexterity and resourcefulness, confirming her as a distinctive poet of dynamic imagination in contemporary British poetry. A reader weighing up the collection gets a clear sense of its strengths and its few lapses.

Work
Redgrove's Wife
Author
Penelope Shuttle
Publisher
Bloodaxe

Poems in this selection

  • Songs
  • To Be Whispered
  • Missing You
  • Totality
  • The Bat of Totality
  • The Glimpse
  • Azucar

arguably her most important work in a successful career as a poet spanning twenty-five years

James Byrne, The Wolf, issue 13

something of an unusual grief map

James Byrne, The Wolf, issue 13
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