Rainsplitter in the Zodiac Garden

by Penelope Shuttle

182 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Penelope Shuttle (b. 1947) has made her home in Cornwall since 1970 and the county's mercurial weather and rich history are continuing sources of inspiration. So too is the personal and artistic union Shuttle shared with her husband, the poet Peter Redgrove, until his untimely death in 2003. The fruitful nature of their relationship is celebrated in her poetry and in the work they accomplished together, most notably in the ground-breaking feminist studies on menstruation, The Wise Wound, and its sequel, Alchemy for Women. Recognition came quickly for Shuttle with an Eric Gregory Award in 1974 that acknowledged her poetry's visionary power. This quality is something she shares with the poets she read in translation, voices such as Rilke, Ahkmatova, and Lorca, whose early influence was far more profound than the pervading realism of the English poets of the period. Shuttle has also written five acclaimed novels as well as seven poetry collections, her Selected Poems (OUP, 1998) being a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Shuttle's poems are full of elemental imagery: water, earth and, in particular, lightening, as in her description of her marriage in 'The Weather House' with its "trembling galvanic rooms". Whilst her subject matter can be everyday - motherhood, depression, bereavement - she refuses to be bound by anecdote, drawing instead on myth and dream to transform reality: in her work "the ordinary seen as heavenly" ('Thief') becomes the norm. In keeping with her role as witness, Shuttle's language sometimes has a ceremonial quality about it, a setting aside of words from their everyday currency which is like the difference between a coin used to buy bread and a coin thrown into a well as an offering "Splashing down//for reverence, not luck" ('The Well at Mylor'). However, when dealing with the intimacies of family life, such as the shift of a daughter into womanhood ('Outgrown') or the process of grief, as in the moving sequence for her husband, 'Missing You', Shuttle can be painfully direct.

http://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/pen...

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel fits firmly within the definition of the experimental novel. Shuttle is a poet primarily, but wrote several novels in the 1970s (this is the third of them). The primary character is Faustina and most of the novel takes place during her pregnancy. Also prominent is her husband Micah. The imagery used is unusual and often difficult to follow; much of it is rooted in nature and the natural world. Faustina sees herself as many different women throughout history. The timescale is past, present and future; often simultaneously. There is often a sense of dislocation about the landscape and settings. Faustina steps in and out of the fetters placed on her by marriage and her relationships and conflicts with Micah play an important role. Shuttle herself says that the story tells of a quest for a hera (not hero) escaping from stereotypical female roles to the underlying individuality.
Victoria Glenndinning in her review says that the novel is “an invitation to trace the mythology of a mind that has left the scheduled tracks and timetables”. The dreamlike nature of Shuttle’s prose has been compared to Anna Kavan.
To give a flavour of the nature of the prose;

“I ate the wheat of the dead. I had one fear, small shaped like a fir-cone, hard as a stone. I folded my hands around my fear once a day, usually in the half light of the winter afternoons, its coldness flowing into my imitational flesh: and I heard the fear speaking, calling to me, hagseed, hagseed ….. But I never answered. I am afraid of becoming his executioner.”
“There are trip-wires stretched across every day. I walked through a series of identical and aged rooms in a footfall house, a permanent retirement from the sea, my true skin’s temperature just above zero.”
There are images and metaphors that are thrown at the reader on every page; it’s a remarkable piece of work, not easy to find and not easy to read; but fans of experimental novels should feel very much at home with it.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the thin mist hour when many of the people die and many of the children fall into terror and life.

A woman endures an abusive marriage to a cruel sadist obsessed with her fertility. Faustina (not her true name) lives in a precarious state of fight or flight from Micah, who beats her and locks her in a room all day. Her world is described in controlled hallucinatory prose that recalls Anna Kavan's Sleep Has His House.

As in Shuttle's first novel All the Usual Hours of Sleeping, the point-of-view shifts often without warning, sometimes even into Micah's head. Within the nonlinear storyline events slide back and forth across an oneiric tapestry, bits of pale fact glowing in the obscure fabric. These events are dissected and splayed across many pages, examined in turn from each corner of a cavernous room filled with looming grotesque imagery. Faustina's erotic relationship with Anna, who later marries her brother Stefan. Micah's desire for a son, and Faustina's initial inability to conceive (combined with her psychological resistance to a child). An unwanted pregnancy and the eventual birth of a son. Their move from one cold old house to another. Stefan's forsaking of Faustina as he grows complicit with Micah. Stefan's death in an automobile accident, of which Anna survives, only to betray Faustina. These are not plot spoilers, as the narrative is skeletal at best and prior knowledge of the events within it, if anything, likely enriches the reading experience, with the possible exception of the ending, which I'll leave untold.

Shuttle and her spouse Peter Redgrove wrote often of the romantic paradigm of two women and one man. This is the third novel I've read of these two writers that takes that paradigm as a major theme. It is also the one I found most engaging. Shuttle's use of poetic language in prose here is among the most impressive that I've encountered lately. For anyone interested in reading her work, a few years back Verbivoracious Press published an omnibus edition of four of her early novels, including this one. Although VP seems to regrettably have since closed its doors, copies of this edition still look to be readily available online.

On a date before true time, when I lived in the flat country where I was born, a man who dealt in candles touched my neck and described to me emotions resembling the pain of tortured humming birds. He said: you are like a lizard whose colour changes at night. Then I ran between the banks of the reservoir and my thinness was shadowing me. And the foetus turned with its long axis across the mouth of the womb at right angles to the birth canal. And the muscles of my body demanded silence I couldn't find, cries and sweat kept escaping from me, the tonality of my body was far away from me, yet diaphanous, waves of burning water and blood and nothing seen distinctly, only shapes of people violating old customs. I am unwinding circles that resemble sleep to tell of what happened during those years.