Listen to Penelope reading and talking about her poetry
Posted July 2016
Reading with John Greening from ‘Heath’
Cornwall Contemporary Poetry Festival, The Falmouth Hotel: Sunday 13 November 2016
Launch of ‘Heath’ at the Ledbury Poetry Festival
Posted July 2016
‘Heath’ is a series of call-
Hounslow Heath, stretching across time-
histories; Heathrow Airport is also explored. The
airport now stands where the old heath used to be,
in the days when it was ‘the most dangerous place in
England’, where highwaymen lurked.
‘Heath’ was launched at the Ledbury Poetry Festival on the 8 July 2016 with a special reading
by Penelope and John Greening . To see the recording of this reading please click here.
Cornwall Contemporary Poetry Festival 2016
Posted July 2016
Exciting news: the second Cornwall Contemporary Poetry Festival will be taking place in Falmouth on the
weekend of Saturday 12th and Sunday 13th November 2016. We’ll be announcing details of the programme soon.
But we’re thrilled to say that it will feature some of the UK’s most celebrated and compelling poets, including:
Alison Brackenbury
Steve Ely
John Greening
Meirion Jordan
Molly Naylor
Pascale Petit
Penelope Shuttle
Jane Yeh
As well as readings, there’ll be a poetry slam, street
performances, open-
workshops – all in the beautiful surroundings of one
of the UK’s liveliest coastal towns. If you would like
further information please click here.
The Cornwall Contemporary Poetry Festival is an
initiative of Falmouth Poetry Group with the support of
Falmouth University, Arts Council England , and The
Tanner Trust. Falmouth Poetry Group was founded in
1972 by the internationally acclaimed poet Peter Redgrove,
and is one of the oldest poetry groups in the country. It
organises regular readings and workshops by published
poets, and meets each month to read and critique members’
poems.
These are poems drawn from the flipside of experience,
undermining and rebuilding syntax in order to precipitate
language, and, in the main, abjuring punctuation. The poems
also engage with inward exploration where both active and
meditative thinking seek a vulnerable equilibrium; poems
more interested in framing questions than arriving at answers.
The volatile and tactile realities and delusions of being in the
world direct much of the language’s traffic here;there’s a
commingling of sadness and wry humour in Shuttle’s travels
through our physical and metaphysical worlds. Pared-
imagery and lyric purpose are embodied here throughout in
the work of a poet who agrees with Ekbert Faas’s comment:
‘as soon as you have a new syntax, you have a new way of
breathing, and as soon as you have that you have a new
consciousness’.
‘Will You Walk a Little Faster?’ is Penelope’s first new book-
length collection since her Bloodaxe retrospective, ‘Unsent:
New & Selected Poems 1980-
celebrate her 70th Birthday on 12 May 2017.
Will You Walk a Little Faster?
Posted August 2016
Penelope Shuttle’s new collection explores cities (London, Bristol) on foot and via inward exploration,
drawing on architecture, history and personal memory.
The Manhattan Review
Posted 6 September 2016
Founded by New York-
of American and international poetry. The magazine strives to publish the work of excellent American
poets alongside the best contemporary British poetry of which Penelope’s poems have been featured in
the magazine since the 1980s.
The featured poem, ‘Serving the People of West London’, was
inspired by a slogan Penelope saw on the 290 bus she used at
Staines, which read, 'Abellio buses, serving the people of West
London'. She says “I like to work from texts taken from outside
the literary point of view, so I used this slogan to imagine
writing poems for the people of West London, as a kind of
unofficial poet-
The poem appears in ‘Heath’, Penelope’s collaborative book
of poems (with John Greening) from Nine Arches Press, about
Hounslow Heath, and Heathrow Airport, both of course in
West London. Please click here to read more poems from
‘Heath’.
On 6th August 2008 poet Victoria Field led a writing and
reflection day for a group of poets at St Clether’s Holy Well,
in The Inney Vale, near Bodmin. It was a day of significance
and healing for me, and resulted in a sequence of poems
about St Clether and the surrounding landscape. I tend to
mull over poems for a long while, and so it is only now,
eight years on, that I have published the sequence.
The Valency Valley at Boscastle on the North Coast of
Cornwall is a beautiful place my late husband Peter Redgrove
and I visited every year from 1970 up until Peter was too
unwell to do the walk, in 1999. It has many dear memories
for me, and our many walks are combined in the poem here.
It also has many associations with the poet Thomas Hardy,
so it was an added bonus for us, to be walking in his
footsteps!
Online magazine 'The Clearing' features new poems
Posted 22 August 2016
'The Clearing' is an online magazine published by ‘Little Toller Books’ and has recently released a series
of new poems by Penelope. A place for writers and artists to share distinctive visions and make bold
statements about the landscapes we live in. Here Penelope shares some background to two of her poems.
"Although ‘Hounslow Heath barely exists today’, Penelope Shuttle’s and John Greening’s poems
conjure back its lost acres, returning to roots, treading ‘old desire paths’. Their lines, lilting with
place names, find room for the Clouded Yellow butterfly, for the Red Kite, for market gardens with
raspberries and rhubarb. ‘Heath’ holds highwaymen, the great planes of Heathrow, the small flight of
a bumblebee. Here are poems which dance, which pad beside a traveller, which mimic the shapes of
scarecrows on the page. This is a work of love. But beware the ghost with a briefcase – and the Wolf
of Perry Oaks." -
"What an impressive, well-
personal memories of two well-
in which they both grew up. Read these poems and you will never tread the proliferating wasteland of
Heathrow Airport without being grateful for this warm, sprightly, thoroughly entertaining introduction
to its rural past." -
“Heath: one word, one disappeared world, two poets. Hounslow Heath was a place of mystery, danger,
fear, wildest beauty; now, among other neatened things, it is Heathrow Airport. In this beguiling
collaboration, which finds two significant and ostensibly very different English poets at or near their
best, we are taken back to a place we can never have known – though Greening and Shuttle, who both
grew up in the area, never completely lose sight of its (and our) present concerns either. The poems are
at times lush, at other times stark, and frequently vivid and memorable. This is a substantial book,
but I didn’t want it to end.” -
Praise for ‘Heath’
Posted August 2016
Cornwall Contemporary Poetry Festival
Will be held in Falmouth, from Thursday 22
to Sunday 25 November 2018
Penelope Shuttle has made her home in Cornwall
since 1970 and the county’s mercurial weather and
rich history are continuing sources of inspiration.
Copyright © 2018 Penelope Shuttle | Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Site Map | Site Update 06.10.18
