Redgrove's Wife
Will be published approx. on 25. May 2006
Book
Paperback/Softback
112 pages
978-1-85224-734-8 (ISBN)
Description
Penelope Shuttle's latest collection, "Redgrove's Wife", is a book of lament and celebration. Its focus is the life and death of her husband, the poet Peter Redgrove, coupled with the loss of her father. Here, grief, depression and ageing are confronted with painful directness, but transformed into life-affirming and redemptive poetry. Other poems written over the same five-year period are inspired by a wide variety of subjects, from Cornish history and landscape to time, weather, spiders and postal regulations. Some draw on myth and dream to reinvent reality, while others take surprising liberties with language itself. Redgrove's Wife offers an extraordinary range of different kinds of poetry: both sensuous and ceremonial, elegiac and erotic, visionary and playful. Penelope Shuttle writes: 'Despite Peter's worsening health, many of the poems take as their task the search for a renewal of life during difficult circumstances. How to go on loving the world, which is what a poet is for, when it deals you severe blows, forcing you to give up much of what gives life its energy and delight. My years as a carer for Peter and the sadness of witnessing his decline into frailty due to a combination of Parkinson's, arthritis and diabetes, were a time when I fought off depression and anger, not always successfully, but turned to poetry as channel for and transformer of such emotions. After Peter died, it was poetry that provided me with "the proper consolations of human loneliness".'
Reviews / Votes
'Her language is worked into something as fluid, slippery and refreshing as a spring. She writes with a buoyant, graceful confidence and she is a unique voice in contemporary British poetry' - PBS BulletinMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Tyne and Wear
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 138 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-85224-734-8 (9781852247348)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Penelope Shuttle has lived in Cornwall since 1970, is the widow of the poet Peter Redgrove. 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) and Lyonesse (due 2021). 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).