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| Interview with Penelope Shuttle by Daneet Steffens PENELOPE SHUTTLE has a landmark birthday coming up and several celebrations planned: there’s the Falmouth bash, the family gathering near London, a more local excursion to Padstow with a close friend – ‘we’ve booked lunch at Rick Stein’s!’ – and, just to round things off, an extended jaunt in Italy. She may as well be celebrating a bit of a new emergence: when her husband, poet Peter Redgrove died in 2003, Penelope found herself not just silenced as a poet, but stymied as a person, confining herself between bed and sofa for eight months: ‘I was silenced by the force of my feelings and that’s a real horror, when you can’t express yourself. I stayed in the house so long that when I finally tried to leave, my old agoraphobia had come back for the first time in years.’ But battling old demons can also make you discover new resources – once you let your grief take its course. ‘I did get my speech back through the form of poetry,’ she says, ‘that was something that broke that awful spell really. But that only came with time. When you’re bereaved you have to go through that time, until time lets you off the leash a bit. Time’s passing, it is clear, has released Penelope from its once-harsh grasp. It’s a chilly, drippy winter’s day in coastal Cornwall, but it’s nice and warm and dry in Penelope’s lived-in, loved-in, comfortingly higgledy-piggledy house just over the hill from Falmouth harbour. She relaxes in a room wallpapered with well-thumbed books, surrounded by pictures of Peter and daughter Zoe – at graduation, at travel, at ease. Sipping tea, she taps generously into both her early family life as well as her 33-year-long relationship with Peter with astonishing facility. Soft-spoken and with a gentle warmth, her ability to speak at length of her past at the drop of a hat, comes as a welcome and enjoyable surprise. Of course, there have been outward indications that she had put her crippling grief behind her: she got herself off that sofa, returned to writing and teaching poetry, was back to rambling walks around her beloved Cornwall and, in 2006, she published the acclaimed – not to mention Forward and T S Eliot-shortlisted – collection, Redgrove’s Wife. For the whole interview, read Issue 33 » Subscribe! |
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