Penelope Shuttle's new collection explores cities (London, Bristol) on foot and via inward exploration, drawing on architecture, history and personal memory. 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 both with active and meditative thinking in order to establish a vulnerable and temporary 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-back 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'.
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[My Life, I can't fool you, you know me too well, I'm sad of myself - MY LIFE] ***(Bloodaxe Books, 7 July 2017, ebook, 112 pages, borrowed from the National Poetry Library)
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This is my first time reading a full collection by the poet. I've read her work in various anthologies over the years. I enjoyed the poems in this collection. However, I must admit I didn't find them very impressive. The poems didn't really say anything new. One of the pleasures I get from reading and writing poems is discovering new insight into life, death and human nature. I love it when I stumble across poems that show me something familiar in strange new lights. This never happens in Will You Walk A Little Faster? The poems aren't terrible but they aren't brilliant either. I don't think any of them will stick in my mind.