History of the Child
Will be published approx. on 26. February 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
128 pages
978-1-78037-785-8 (ISBN)
Description
Penelope Shuttle's History of the Child is a highly evocative exploration of childhood, memory, and imagination, blending personal and historical perspectives. The book's themes include parenting, grief, nature, emotional recovery and connections to the past, guided by the idea of childhood as a transformative and rebellious space.
The first of the book's four sections features poems about Katherine of Aragon, the Vestal Virgins, Stanley Spencer and Wallace Stevens, with a focus on grief, nature, and animals. ?The second, Book of Lullabies, steps closer to the theme of the child, with poems about memory, inwardness, climate change, sexuality in older age, and the natural world. ?
The third part, History of the Child, is a journey back to Penelope Shuttle's own childhood, blending personal memories with imagined perspectives to explore psychological crises, emotional recovery, and the traumas of childhood. ? It introduces an 'alternative girl child self', inspired by Persian legends, by her late husband Peter Redgrove's dream of such a girl ('my death, and she is my soul'), and by a friend's fanciful wish. The culminating fourth section is a playful sequence about a little table, inspired by her mother and her childhood. ? The table symbolises connection to her mother, who lived to be 100 years old, and their shared history. ?
Penelope Shuttle's History of the Child is guided by themes of memory, imagination, foreboding, magic, history and humour, and seeks to articulate the essence of 'being' through fiery language and elemental imagery. ? She draws inspiration from Donald Winnicott's concept of the 'potentive space' where play, fantasy and reality intersect.
The first of the book's four sections features poems about Katherine of Aragon, the Vestal Virgins, Stanley Spencer and Wallace Stevens, with a focus on grief, nature, and animals. ?The second, Book of Lullabies, steps closer to the theme of the child, with poems about memory, inwardness, climate change, sexuality in older age, and the natural world. ?
The third part, History of the Child, is a journey back to Penelope Shuttle's own childhood, blending personal memories with imagined perspectives to explore psychological crises, emotional recovery, and the traumas of childhood. ? It introduces an 'alternative girl child self', inspired by Persian legends, by her late husband Peter Redgrove's dream of such a girl ('my death, and she is my soul'), and by a friend's fanciful wish. The culminating fourth section is a playful sequence about a little table, inspired by her mother and her childhood. ? The table symbolises connection to her mother, who lived to be 100 years old, and their shared history. ?
Penelope Shuttle's History of the Child is guided by themes of memory, imagination, foreboding, magic, history and humour, and seeks to articulate the essence of 'being' through fiery language and elemental imagery. ? She draws inspiration from Donald Winnicott's concept of the 'potentive space' where play, fantasy and reality intersect.
Reviews / Votes
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 * on Lyonesse, The Observer, Poetry Book of the Month * The first section of the book, in a breathtaking showcase of skill and imagination, animates the mythical land of Lyonesse, which in legend once sat at the southwestern tip of Cornwall. Symbolism, the surreal, spiritual motifs, and more, shift and swirl together, as fluid and full of changeability as the 'shape-shift silvers' of wave and sea that we delve beneath to encounter this once-was place. In the second part of the book... Shuttle paints a picture of life without a beloved, bringing details to the fore in order to tell - and touch - the reader. Fluid, thoughtful, and full of imagination, this is quite simply a must-read. -- Mab Jones * Buzz Magazine, on Lyonesse * Penelope Shuttle's wonderful 13th collection is two books in one. The first half of Lyonesse maps a mythical, submerged stretch of land between Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, where lions and ballgowns jostle for attention with sunken gods and pre-Raphaelite artist and muse Lizzie Siddal. Shuttle uses this terrain to explore loss, both personal and environmental. The second half, New Lamps for Old, focuses more directly on life after bereavement and its shifting sensations... Throughout Shuttle's language has a vivid, smile-raising immediacy: 'venture towards the happiness wherever daylight invites us'. -- Rishi Dastidar * The Guardian *More details
Edition
Paperback original
Language
English
Place of publication
Tyne and Wear
United Kingdom
Product notice
Paperback (UK-trade)
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
Thickness: 9 mm
Weight
305 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-78037-785-8 (9781780377858)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Penelope Shuttle has lived in Cornwall since 1970, is the widow of the poet Peter Redgrove, and has a grown-up daughter Zoe, who works in the field of sustainable energy.
Her first collection of poems,The Orchard Upstairs (1981) was followed by six other books from Oxford University Press, The Child-Stealer (1983), The Lion from Rio (1986), Adventures with My Horse (1988), Taxing the Rain (1994), Building a City for Jamie (1996) and Selected Poems 1980-1996 (1998), and then A Leaf Out of His Book (1999) from Oxford Poets/Carcanet, and Redgrove's Wife (2006) and Sandgrain and Hourglass (2010) from Bloodaxe Books. Redgrove's Wife was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2006. Sandgrain and Hourglass is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her retrospective, Unsent: New & Selected Poems 1980-2012 (Bloodaxe Books, 2012), drew on ten collections published over three decades plus the title-collection, Unsent. Her later collections from Bloodaxe are Will you walk a little faster? (2017), Lyonesse (2021) and History of the Child (2026). Her double collection Lyonesse was longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2022. Heath, a collaboration about Hounslow Heath with John Greening, was published by Nine Arches in 2016.
First published as a novelist, her fiction includes All the Usual Hours of Sleeping (1969), Wailing Monkey Embracing a Tree (1973) and Rainsplitter in the Zodiac Garden (1977). With Peter Redgrove, she is co-author of The Wise Wound: Menstruation and Everywoman (1978) and Alchemy for Women: Personal Transformation Through Dreams and the Female Cycle (1995), as well as a collection of poems, The Hermaphrodite Album (1973), and two novels, The Terrors of Dr Treviles: A Romance (1974) and The Glass Cottage: A Nautical Romance (1976).
Her first collection of poems,The Orchard Upstairs (1981) was followed by six other books from Oxford University Press, The Child-Stealer (1983), The Lion from Rio (1986), Adventures with My Horse (1988), Taxing the Rain (1994), Building a City for Jamie (1996) and Selected Poems 1980-1996 (1998), and then A Leaf Out of His Book (1999) from Oxford Poets/Carcanet, and Redgrove's Wife (2006) and Sandgrain and Hourglass (2010) from Bloodaxe Books. Redgrove's Wife was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2006. Sandgrain and Hourglass is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her retrospective, Unsent: New & Selected Poems 1980-2012 (Bloodaxe Books, 2012), drew on ten collections published over three decades plus the title-collection, Unsent. Her later collections from Bloodaxe are Will you walk a little faster? (2017), Lyonesse (2021) and History of the Child (2026). Her double collection Lyonesse was longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2022. Heath, a collaboration about Hounslow Heath with John Greening, was published by Nine Arches in 2016.
First published as a novelist, her fiction includes All the Usual Hours of Sleeping (1969), Wailing Monkey Embracing a Tree (1973) and Rainsplitter in the Zodiac Garden (1977). With Peter Redgrove, she is co-author of The Wise Wound: Menstruation and Everywoman (1978) and Alchemy for Women: Personal Transformation Through Dreams and the Female Cycle (1995), as well as a collection of poems, The Hermaphrodite Album (1973), and two novels, The Terrors of Dr Treviles: A Romance (1974) and The Glass Cottage: A Nautical Romance (1976).