'On my surfaces like dew': drowned worlds revived

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Lyonesse, Penelope Shuttle, Lyonesse (Bloodaxe); Stranger in the Mask of a Deer

Richard Skelton, (Penned in the Margins)

Here are two excellent and timely collections. They are timely because published in a period of climate emergency, when rising sea-waters and retreating ice-caps make the threat to our current pattern of life increasingly clear. This immediacy is refracted through a much deeper and farther pre-historical context, however. In Lyonnesse Penelope Shuttle explores the legendary kingdom of western Cornwall, thought to have been lost in a cataclysmic Bronze Age inundation, with only the Isles of Scilly and St Michael’s Mount left visible above the waves; and Richard Skelton enacts the life and mind of a Late-Upper Paleolithic hunter, following the animals that have followed the melting ice-sheets northwards on a British peninsula still part of northern Europe. Their excellence as collections derives not only from such visionary perspectives but from the poets’ creative skills in mimesis, their enactment through rhythm, metaphor and line of ways of life which are at once deeply other and uncannily familiar. Such psychological exploration of the historical continuities of human existence from past epochs to our own is remarkably done, and is enhanced by the typographical skills of the publishers. Every aspect of this poetry signals significance, and I already fear that my brief prose will fail to do them justice.

      Lyonesse is in two parts, the first dealing with the drowned kingdom of Lyonesse, and the second, ‘New Lamps for Old’, describing a slow recovery from trauma. These exist in necessary continuity, and it emerges that their composition overlapped. This structure reminded me of ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, where the actual shipwreck and loss of life in Part the Second is delayed until we have shared a more personal wreck in Part the First: the breaking down of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s personality under an astonished recognition of the unstoppable force of the divine. And we are meant to read the second wreck through the first. It is only through such a progress that the nun’s final cry of fearful acceptance makes sense. In Shuttle’s collection, it becomes clear that the cataclysm evokes grief and loss, not so much its first shock as the underwater world which follows upon that, in a dream-like experience, as if sleep-swimming while time and tides pass by. 

      The loss was of her life-partner, Peter Redgrove (1932¬2003), a fellow poet and her co-author of poetry and novels as well as works on alchemy, dreams and the female cycle. She has written of him before, notably in Redgrove’s Wife, shortlisted for the Forward Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2006. They had lived in Cornwall since 1970. Now personal loss and loss of landscape combine, with the ocean carrying both destruction and the possibility of recovery over the years. Thus patterns of time recur throughout, in underwater church bells and traditional songs, in sea shanty refrains and children’s games. And yet this is also a dream landscape cut free of time, discoverable only in the imagination and wit of the poet:

There’s all the time in the world 

in these sea-cold gardens raked to a Zen precision. (p. 81)

      The couple’s decades together come unbidden through the imagination in bright and witty detail. Grief becomes a mythic journey of glimpses, then, with unpredictable metaphors and memories suddenly emerging from seemingly empty hours of predictable days. The Lyonesse of romance comes filtered through an underwater light and is opened up to new exploration through an impressive diversity of layout and form. Human loss and the human potential for renewal are both touchingly present. Mystery and clarity of vision co-exit too, as scientific investigation of a Bronze Age inundation and the archaeological record of other sunken cities meet the oral remnants of a lost place in its other French, Breton and Cornish manifestations: Leonnoys, Léonois, Loonois, Lethostow, Lyonaise. (Endnotes provide interesting detail and a different discourse.) The role of poetry itself is therapeutic, as is the support of writers’ workshop members and friends who stimulated and then responded to the emergent work. Ancient poets add another kind of support, as Thomas Hardy, Walter de la Mare, Marianne Moore and, perhaps especially, David Jones contribute lines and echoes into the weave of the text. 

      The detritus of an ocean bed of artifacts is a stark representation of grief: ‘down here / no one cares / if you’re honest or a liar / rich or poor / the only virtue here / is how much / you’ve forgotten / of that blood-boltered world / above the shiver / and pound / of the waves […] (‘Inscribed on a Stela found on the seabed’, p. 27). Where Lyonesse was once a city of lovers, now ‘lovers / are plentiful bone on the seabed’ (‘Sentimental Customs’, p. 28). This may be the emotional low point of the poem, though irrepressible verbal play soon adds lift:

The lions of Lyonesse

were legends

in their own raw lifetime

[…]

those golden guys with manes

and gaping slavering jaws 

the piss-backwards lords of Lyonesse 

(‘Legends’, p. 33)

Unsurprisingly, lions recur in this place, powerful yet cautious, as in their refrain: 

Around Cape Horn there’s ice and snow

but lions know where not to go

(‘Holy Father Lions’, p. 46)

      On the opposite page, words from an unpublished notebook of Peter Redgrove give a clue to his continued lordly presence, with whom his wife still speaks: ‘I’ll be your partner in fainting / I’ll fly out of the storm’s eye / be your sword blade / in the hard school of blood / […] I’ll bring you my bird-in-the-hand / pitch you the swansong of Lyonesse’ (‘O Shake That Girl with the Blue Dress On’, p. 47). That blue dress might suggest that this love poem is a mirror of Thomas Hardy’s haunted poem of lost love, ‘The Voice’, recalling his future wife whom he met in her ‘air-blue gown’ on his journey as a young architect into Cornwall, which he called Lyonesse.

     The spectrum of tones is remarkable. These range from the stark prose poem ‘An Account of the Submergence’ (‘Our conclusion is that the seas will go on rising. That cities not yet destroyed will turn blind eye and deaf ear to Lyonesse the wiser’ pp. 54-56) to the wild beatitudes of the ‘Sermon of the Crayfish Christ, or The Latitudes’ (pp. 86-87). The Holy Ghost and The Devil face each other across pages 70 and 71. But within the book as a whole, the major shift of tone comes in Part Two: New Lamps For Old. This reference to the fairytale motif of Aladdin and the genie signals a mysterious transition of tone and state of mind: 

shall we go out

into the long-ago summer evening

you my dear Duke Orsino

me my usual self

and drink our fill of the evening

as we always did

from Falmouth held out to us

applewood cup filled to the brim

‘cup of evenings’, p. 99)

      These are all poems written, as the poet says, ‘when I came up for air from the watery depths of Lyonesse […] an account of finding ways to begin again, to find meaning in life after bereavement […] a transit from sadness, moving via reflection in language to (it is my hope) poems possessing energised repose’ (p. 13). So there are light and delicacy here, as in that brimming applewood cup, rainwater instead of salt, a Japanese feeling for nature that is the opposite of a Zen precision raked by the tides:

only the moon abroad in her finery

saw the lost one go

down where the valley brims with hawthorn

came so close    the lost

but slipped away star-ripple in the river

(‘fly-by-night’, p. 106)

      The long sequence ‘Swarthmoor Hall, Ulverston’ (pp. 108-116) is particularly moving. In this Quaker retreat house, something of an atmosphere of silent contemplation leading to illumination pervades the poems composed there: ‘prune the appletrees / seal their wounds with wax’ […] ‘carry a handful of ash / from the fire pit // scatter it in the beck flowing / between shadow and sunlight / under the oaks’ (p. 109). The movement towards the moment when ‘things decide to continue’ is beautifully caught: 

the hills all the flowers known and unknown to me

every blade of grass all decide to continue

(p. 113)

Sad memories recur, of course, of fraught hospital visits and empty rooms. There is also the honest recognition of memories passing like glances over a shoulder: ‘as you fade away / gleam by gleam / like a small lovely morning / only you and I can see / and now it’s gone’ (‘glance’, p. 129). New Lamps For Old ends by magically countering the refracted world of Lyonesse, as loved cityscapes are caught in passing within a mirror ‘smaller than a tear or the curve / of the earth’ (p. 149). The intimate and the vast are held in remarkable balance here. It takes a bold and lithe poet to manage that. And it occurred to me that the fine cover page might be altered to read Penelope Shuttle: Lioness.