An Alphabet of Sestudes for Saint Feock by 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