First published in the Times Literary Supplement
Penelope Shuttle invokes Blake’s “world in a grain of sand” and “eternity in an hour” in her title, Sandgrain and Hourglass. These poems of loss and mourning, following from Redgrove’s Wife, pay tribute to her late husband Peter Redgrove’s love of “the microcosmic – / sandgrains, water droplets / chips of granite . . . ” and range across continents, from Penzance to Baghdad, by way of meditations on “Distance” and “Telling the Time”. With a glancing comparison to Rembrandt, “the Master of the Small Landscape”, Shuttle also ushers in allusive worlds of painting, literature, hagiography and folklore, into which her grief expands. In “Gifts”, she offers to take the sufferings of the famously unfortunate upon herself, but at the same time enters into a competition, as though challenging them: “Take my breasts / St Agatha / Take my tongue Philomela”.
Anne Boleyn, John Milton and Hannibal Lecter – Shuttle’s pantheon includes those who inflict pain as well as those who suffer – are rivals too and therefore they provide her with a yardstick of sorrows. But grief proves the mother of invention in this collection, as Shuttle dreams up more devices for quantifying memories and auditing the past.
“Machine” describes a gadget for “grading kisses / on an approximate scale of 1–20”, while “In Your Sleep” takes stock of words “harvested . . . from the quiet of night”, when her husband was talking in his sleep. Shuttle does not discount these nocturnal “riches saved for a rainy day”, but she takes little comfort in them. Even the sandgrain, with its promise of cosmic insight, is reduced to part of a measuring instrument in the title poem: a particle marking the tiniest interval of time. Shuttle’s bleakest poems work through repetition and often resist any consoling resolution. Most frequently repeated is an increasingly lonely “I” at the start of a line. Lines and stanzas of unpredictable lengths spiral out from this “I” as Shuttle tries to redefine it, making her more whimsical poems read uncomfortably.
The closeness of Shuttle’s “you” softens this sense of a world shrinking without the beloved in it any longer. His memory can be restored, even multiplied through a lyrical mirroring: “You have your sandgrain / and your sorrow. / I have my hourglass / and my grief”. The world she rebuilds for herself can contain laughter at its own shortcomings, with its “Royal Society for the Promotion of Loneliness” and box of tissues in every room, but also the “wren song” of modest happiness, the self-sufficient pleasures of the singer “who keeps his shop in his throat”.
