An Alphabet of Sestudes for Saint Feock - Penelope Shuttle

Who is Saint Feock?  Or is it Faycock, Fioc, Maeoc or Veage?  The Cornish Saint Feock is a half-imaginary, half-historic personage. Our saint is sometimes female, sometimes male. An early Christian missionary, or an elemental spirit whose domain is a riverside creek. This liminal mysterious figure called to me until I found myself writing an alphabet to celebrate his/her qualities. I used the form of the sestude, to give shape and purpose to my encounters with Feock of Kernow, to conjure up this elusive alluring saint.

Penelope Shuttle

 

‘Here in the layered constraints of writing sestudes for a little-known saint, Shuttle illuminates ‘invisibility’ with the wit of her poetic irony as well as rich imagination. The parish of Feock is setting and landscape for these explorations: wooden stocks for wooden-legged miscreants; tongues that are native and archival; a medieval bestiary of the pelican; that Gareth Malone ‘Xmas CD’. Cornish villages are invoked in the Kernewek of their ancestry where myth and mystery still live and speak; from alchemy to foodbanks, the poems in this collection trace all the fundamental links.’

Mike Ferguson

 

‘Penelope Shuttle writes “as naturally as the leaves to a tree”. Her line is fluent as leaf sap, her words have pores that make oxygen. She is a complete natural and this is even more impressive when she is writing in a form strict and brief as the sestude – an alphabet for Saint Feock is a breath of Cornish air, a joyous lovesong to language and life.’

Pascale Petit