Lyonesse

The submerged land of Lyonesse was once part of Cornwall, according to myth and the oral tradition, standing for a lost paradise in Arthurian legend, but now an emblem of human frailty in the face of climate change. And there was indeed a Bronze Age inundation event which swept the entire west of Cornwall under the sea, with only the Scilly Isles and St Michael’s Mount left as remnants above sea-level. Lyonesse was also Thomas Hardy’s name for Cornwall where Penelope Shuttle has lived all her adult life, always fascinated by the stories and symbolic presence of Lyonesse. After seeing the Scilly Isles from a small plane at a low altitude – flying over the Wolf Lighthouse ­– and then visiting the recent Sunken Cities exhibition at the British Museum, imagination and memory played their part in joining the Lyonesse dots together for her, prompting what she calls ‘a spontaneous inundation of approaches to the theme, images, soundings of Lyonesse’. As she writes in a preface to this book: ‘The universality of loss, both of physical cities and of the human experience erased from the record, enhanced the resource of Lyonesse in my writing. Lyonesse is a place of paradox. It is real, had historical existence. It is also an imaginary region for exploring depths. It holds grief for many kinds of loss… The poems seek re-wilding of a city where human loss interconnects with mythic loss; myth is rooted in the real.’ The second part of this book – New Lamps for Old ­– is a collection of poems she needed to write in coming up for air from the watery depths of Lyonesse, to find ways to begin again, to find meaning in life after bereavement. The ‘old lamps’ of a former life have been extinguished, leaving darkness. Her challenge was to find ‘new lamps’ to illuminate and give meaning to life. Lyonesse is a fluid magical world. The poems of New Lamps for Old are concerned with earth, air and fire. Both collections share allegiance with the fifth element, the spirit.

Table of Contents:
11 Preface LYONESSE 19 Door 20 Palm Sunday 21 The Gownshops 22 Our Cradle Sea 23 Strike, strike the bell 24 Make a Wish 25 Kelpy 26 easy 27 Inscribed on a Stela found on the seabed 28 Sentimental Customs 29 Night Gate 30 by the hoar rock in the drowned wood 32 here’s my Lyonesse 33 Legends 34 Fortuna 35 Owls 36 clad me naked 37 Why the Maidens prefer future funk to a Sumerian goat 38 Interviewing Neptune 39 My Friend 40 In the dark 41 Saturdays & Sundays 42 When the Devil seals the seam with hot pitch 43 Midsummer 44 Lizzie 45 Willow o’ the Wisp 46 Holy Father Lions 47 O Shake That Girl with the Blue Dress On 48 Boat-drawn 49 Rusalka 50 Siren Scholarship 51 The Foster Brothers of Kernow Speak 52 Sewing Lesson Under the Sea 53 land under sea 54 An Account of the Submergence 57 land under sea 58 Church of the Crayfish Christ 59 Up jumps the shark 60 Starlit 61 On St Mary’s Quayside an old salt button-holes a passer-by 62 Many brave hearts are asleep in the deep, so beware, beware 63 Jackie Onassis orders new dancing shoes 64 Twinned with Canopus 65 They say the voiced angel is an invention of the English 66 More deadly than the Siren’s song is the Siren’s silence 67 We are the servants of lions 68 Sea Street 69 The Restorer 70 May the Holy Ghost blow your sailboat home 71 The Devil 72 Praise the Crayfish Christ striding over the waves! 73 Mermaid sightings here 74 Cradle-rocker’s Report 75 Prospectus: Lyonesse College 76 The Foster Brothers of Kernow Speak 77 My Old Lover 78 Lions on a love prowl 79 Wooden Lady 80 My own volition 81 Time in the World 82 Blues 84 Solo 85 Who’s down there 86 Sermon of the Crayfish Christ, or The Latitudes 88 When and If 89 Blessing 90 Goodbye 93 Notes NEW LAMPS FOR OLD 99 cup of evenings 100 what is the air made of? 101 new lamps for old 102 husband 103 home 104 Dusk coming on 105 sevenfold 106 fly-by-night 107 some strange hour of night 108 Swarthmoor Hall, Ulverston 117 my house 118 St Olave’s Church 119 Village of La Baleine 120 as long as the thorn tree stands 121 Kandinsky at the Tate 122 Hell 123 longing is part of it 124 the train is 125 Ruby Loftus screwing a breech ring for a Bofors Anti-Aircraft Gun 126 break of day/this one evening 129 glance 130 other elements 131 love letters 132 May time 133 Ann Boleyn’s Music Book 134 May evening 135 Under Ragged Stone Hill 143 clouds in the sky 144 wild rose 145 Malvern Link 146 the four queens find Lancelot sleeping 147 found poem: Swarthmoor Hall 148 Three Years 149 in the mirror 153 Notes

About the Author :
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 (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).

Review :
Penelope Shuttle, as both thinker and poet, seems to me exemplary in her use of the intuitive faculty: a self-forgetful procedure for the renewal of awareness which one might describe as the making of leaps, rather than the taking of "logical" steps, or what Virilio, discussing Proust, calls "the Sophist idea of agape, the suddenness of this possible entry into another logic". 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. One of our most compellingly sensuous poets… Shuttle is a poet of immense reach, both in the range of her subject-matter and the breadth of her language. She is both an acute observer and an inventive fiction-maker. One senses that she has her life perfectly in tune with her poetry, so that it registers the slightest variation in her state of being. In this sense, the narratives of emotional, erotic and maternal love that can be traced through these poems collocate into the drama of a life lived in the full flood of being.