Penelope Shuttle

This omnibus edition collects the four full-length novels from prolific poet, essayist, playwright, and novelist Penelope Shuttle, published between 1969 and 1980. Shuttle's novels merge poetic language with the novel form unlike virtually anyone else before or since. All the Usual Hours of Sleeping (1969), is a large and dense work, full of rich, poetic imagery, at its heart a love story involving four people. The use of language is taken well beyond its normal descriptive function: bathos where the grossly physical facts of sexual encounters meet the language of myth, or where obscure, slightly comical words are used to describe sexual passion. Wailing Monkey Embracing a Tree (1973) develops this dense poetic language, abounding in imagery, obscure vocabulary, and beguiling rhythms. Rainsplitter in the Zodiac Garden (1978), has a different tone to the previous two: the prose is bleaker, harder and more direct. The story and the prose have a mythic quality and seem to exist in an ahistorical or trans-historical continuum of time and place. The Mirror of the Giant (1980), subtitled 'A Ghost Story', has two meanings: Theron is haunted by the ghost of his dead wife Vellet--literally, as Vellet is a character in the novel--and his current wife Beth is metaphorically haunted by her former female lover Ash, whom she has not seen for five years. These four novels showcase Shuttle's talent for powerful poetic prose at its peak. "It could be that Miss Shuttle has become the prisoner of her own verbal inspiration, so that the language is telling her what to do. It could be that I have not yet perceived the relation between the rhythm and the story. This is not a book which gives you all it has on one reading. On the contrary, it is designed to be reread." -- Robert Nye "[H]er opening chapters abound in sentences of excessively wrought luxuriance . . . while her closing ones adopt a tone of more tightly disciplined naturalism." -- Andrew Motion

The Penelope Shuttle Omnibus

Peter Redgrove

"Answers many of the questions that one had never thought or dared to ask."--Margaret Drabble

Menstruation and Everywoman

The Wise Wound

The 12th collection of poems from British poet Penelope Shuttle, drawing on architecture, history, and personal memory.

Will You Walk a Little Faster?

The submerged land of Lyonesse was once part of Cornwall, according to myth, standing for a lost paradise in Arthurian legend, but becomes an emblem of human frailty in the face of climate change in Penelope Shuttle's new poems. The second part of the book, New Lamps for Old, is a collection of poems searching for meaning in life after bereavement.

Lyonesse

Answers many of the questions that one had never thought or dared to ask. From the Foreword by Margaret Drabble This best-selling classic is now back in print after ten years. A groundbreaking study of the facts, fantasies and taboos surrounding menstruation, "The Wise Wound" has helped bring about a profound shift in women's attitudes towards a natural phenomenon that has been despised and denigrated for centuries. "The Wise Wound" explores the historical and cultural legacy of this repression, from its effects on the way medicine treats women to the displaced appearance of menstrual imagery at all levels of our culture. Thoroughly researched yet highly readable, combining psychology, anthropology and poetry, their theories are illustrated using examples ranging from "The Bible" to the cult film "The Exorcist. The Wise Wound" also offers practical advice for women on how to get in touch with the hidden energies of their own moon cycle. First published in 1978, "The Wise Wound" has gone through numerous editions, with 100,000 copies printed. This is an important literary event. Other books on menstruation have followed, but this was the first and still has the broadest appeal. " "The first accessible book about menstruation as a human reality ... entirely praiseworthy."?"The Sunday Times" "It could bring about a major change in our understanding of the sexes."?"Psychology Today" Penelope Shuttle is a noted feminist poet and novelist. Her acclaimed novels, including the most recent "The Mirror of the Giant," are published by Marion Boyars. In 1996, Peter Redgrove received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. His highly praised manifesto on the Gaia hypothesis, "The Black Goddess" and the "Sixth Sense" first appeared in 1987.

This groundbreaking study of the facts, fantasies and taboos surrounding menstruation has helped bring about a profound shift in attitudes towards a natural phenomenon that has been reviled and denigrated over the centuries. Thoroughly researched yet highly readable, combining psychology, anthropology and poetry, the authors illustrate their theories using examples ranging from the Bible to such modern horrors as vampire movies and cult film The Exorcist. Book jacket.

The Myths, Realities, and Meanings of Menstruation

"This study of the facts, fantasies and taboos surrounding menstruation has helped bring about a profound shift in attitudes towards a natural phenomenon that has been reviled and denigrated over the centuries. Thoroughly researched yet highly readable, combining psychology, anthropology and poetry, Shuttle and Redgrove illustrate their theories using examples ranging from The Bible to such modern day pop horrors as vampire movies and the cult film The Exorcist."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Myths, Realities, and Meanings of Menstruation

The wise wound, menstruation & everywoman

Eve's Curse and Everywoman

The Mirror of the Giant

John Greening

Heath

Charts a variety of transactions between poet-self and wound, between wound and beast.

Sandgrain and Hourglass

The Child-stealer

Penelope Shuttle is a law unto herself. She writes brilliant, funny, clever, sometimes outrageous, poetry. This lovely new collection shows her slightly disturbed, both by the coming of middle-age, and the growing-up of a daughter. This book is intended for women's studies, and readers of Penelope Shuttle (and her husband and co-author of prose, Peter Redgrove), and other poetry lovers.

Building a City for Jamie

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".'

Redgrove's Wife

The title, according to the blurb, is the Chinese name of a sexual position, and the novel itself is a logophagaic adventure, a dark, word-drunk exploration of emotional and sexual passions presented in lyrical, often nonsensical, image-driven mini-chapters of vivid, swooning, sometimes ludicrous (pretentious?), always invigorating prose.

Penelope Shuttle

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