{"id":8190,"date":"2017-07-22T09:58:20","date_gmt":"2017-07-22T08:58:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8190"},"modified":"2017-07-22T09:58:30","modified_gmt":"2017-07-22T08:58:30","slug":"penelope-shuttle-will-you-walk-a-little-faster-reviewed-by-ken-evans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8190","title":{"rendered":"Penelope Shuttle, Will you walk a little faster?<\/em>, reviewed by Ken Evans"},"content":{"rendered":"
Penelope Shuttle, Will you walk a little faster?<\/em> (Bloodaxe Books, \u00a39.95).<\/h5>\n

The eponymous title poem of Penelope Shuttle\u2019s latest collection, Will you walk a little faster?<\/em>, keen \u2018Alice\u2019 fans will know, is a line from \u2018The Mock Turtle Song\u2019 in Lewis Carroll\u2019s, Alice in Wonderland<\/em>. The minimalist simplicity of Shuttle\u2019s form here, is not a homage to \u2018The Mock Turtle\u2019, which is mostly rhyming couplets, but shares a style of a slightly bewildered and bewildering, child-like, nonsensical voice, \u2018looking\u2019 askance at the world. Shuttle equates her mature poet\u2019s view (this collection is published to celebrate her 70th birthday) with the small girl\u2019s vision, as the poet, also through peripatetic wandering, walks the cityscapes of London and Bristol, and considers what lies beneath through the \u2018rabbit-holes\u2019 of her own vision.<\/p>\n

\u2018Will you walk a little faster? said a whiting to a snail,
\nThere’s a porpoise close behind us, and he’s treading on my tail.
\n…Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2013Lewis Carroll<\/p>\n

The Mock Turtle schooling happens under the sea, apposite given Shuttle\u2019s Cornish connections, sea-water and light and shore rarely far from these poems.
\n\u2018Mock Turtle Soup\u2019 was made from the head and brains of \u2018calves\u2019. It may be Shuttle refers here to the celebrated love of her life, the poet Peter Redgrove, with whom she lived in the South-West, who to some extent \u2018schooled,\u2019 grew and nurtured her own poetic \u2018brains,\u2019 in what seems a symbiotic, relationship, until his death in 2003, aged 71. Though a lifetime\u2019s passion, there are intriguing, small admissions, as in \u2018My Life,\u2019 the opening poem in the collection, of the long shadow cast by love lost:<\/p>\n

\u2018I know you so well,
\nMy life, not at all\u2019<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

It can\u2019t always have been easy, being co-habiting poets. There are hints of a predatory, compulsive element to it, as in, \u2018Down-time\/along this quiet London street, time to remember\/his eagle\u2019s grip on happiness.\u2019 (\u2018Quiet Street\u2019.) That eagle grips pulls the reader up smartly, something altogether darker in a bird of prey\u2019s grip, employed to kill, and lord-over. But Shuttle has a very English stoicism that prevents these glimpses being lingered over.<\/p>\n

Shuttle\u2019s poems are reflective, lyrical \u2013 her \u2018Dwell-times\u2019. Two poems start with \u2018Quiet\u2019 in their titles, and \u2018Quiet Street\u2019, begins with this phrase, \u2018Dwell-time\u2019 and additionally, has the word \u2018quiet\u2019 three times in twenty-two lines. There is a strong sense of her living as an outsider-looking-in on life, at the home they once shared, as in \u2018As I fell\u2019 where \u2013 \u2018my life \/ folded into silly solemn minutes \/ of years\u2019 and where, \u2018I\u2019m getting closer \/ and closer \/ to you.\u2019 Though haunted, there is an under-cutting, sardonic voice in the poems that cuts through: \u2018The dead are writing on the ceiling\/as if their deaths depend on it\u2019 (\u2018On the Ceiling.\u2019)<\/p>\n

Shuttle\u2019s style is spare, employing short-syllabled words, often only five or six to a line. She writes mostly in continuous, single stanzas, with little punctuation, and no end-stops at the final-line, suggesting a literal and metaphoric open-endedness, or irresolution, mimicking the \u2018will you, won\u2019t you\u2019 indecision of the \u2018The Mock Turtle Song.\u2019<\/p>\n

All these concerns coalesce in the title poem. The poet, (\u2018like Alice \/ I look both ways\u2019), is walking in Oxford, (\u2018the brainbox city\u2019). But she is not, \u2018hurrying off…to see the remains of a dodo \/ I plan to read \/ not one \/ of the six million books \/ in the Bodleian.\u2019
\nShe eschews the \u2018dreamy spires\u2019 for her own \u2018Looking-Glass\u2019 dreams \u2013 often grotesque \u2013 where the heretics Latimer and Ridley are roasted alive there on \u2018god\u2019s turnspit\u2019 and the history that lies behind \u2018this leather-bound city\u2019 (wrapped in the dead-skins of animals) is violent. <\/p>\n

Until she finds \u2018The Physic Garden\u2019, with Nature\u2019s curative powers and solace, where \u2018like the porpoise not the snail \/ I\u2019m walking faster \/ waltzing…\u2019, but the bucolic morphs into a vision of an asylum, \u2018the wards and waiting rooms…an earthy source of tincture and tisane, \/ the help-yourself of nature\u2019…\u2018wears a green coat \/ not white \/ don\u2019t you agree?\u2019 Oxford, the home of the intellect, is also the site of insanity, which only nature, which provides the \u2018affordable art \/ of clouds and rain\u2019 (\u2018Knowledge\u2019) can cure. The questioning of \u2018Don\u2019t you agree?\u2019 as the end line sounds a conversational, but also anxious conclusion.<\/p>\n

Ken Evans<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Penelope Shuttle, Will you walk a little faster? (Bloodaxe Books, \u00a39.95). The eponymous title poem of Penelope Shuttle\u2019s latest collection, Will you walk a little faster?, keen \u2018Alice\u2019 fans will know, is a line from \u2018The Mock Turtle Song\u2019 in Lewis Carroll\u2019s, Alice in Wonderland. The minimalist simplicity of Shuttle\u2019s form here, is not a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nPenelope Shuttle, Will you walk a little faster?, reviewed by Ken Evans - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8190\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Penelope Shuttle, Will you walk a little faster?, reviewed by Ken Evans - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Penelope Shuttle, Will you walk a little faster? 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