Penelope Shuttle, like many of the poets who emerged during the late 1960s and 1970s, is concerned with charting the landscape of inner experience and intimate relationships. More particularly, she is drawn to the intersection between the powerful rhythms of women's bodily experience and their imaginative, creative, relational lives. A novelist and author of radio plays as well as a poet, Shuttle often brings a proselike directness to her poems and a poetic resonance and intensity to her prose. Although she terms herself a "feminist radical Social Democrat" in politics and speaks of her desire to provide "validation for the psyche of women unclouded by patriarchal requirements," her poetry is neither exclusively feminist nor overtly political; rather, she seeks to evoke both masculine and feminine aspects of herself and of her reader, to confront the emotional with the intellectual. She has been linked in Blake Morrison and Andrew...