"Nowadays / the most serious things / come into my heart / lightly", writes Penelope Shuttle in this, her 10th collection. A moving and abundant book of more than 70 poems, Sandgrain and Hourglass follows on from Redgrove's Wife, a volume of defiant, celebratory elegies for her late husband, the poet Peter Redgrove, which featured some of Shuttle's best writing. Many of these new poems also focus on loss and the changing faces of grief, but find  as in the book's coda  that "Happiness returns, after a long absence", even if "she's a very small creature indeed". Again and again, Shuttle relates complex emotions with a light earnestness, humour, and electric imagination. Take "Gansey", where the zigzag patterning of the eponymous "extreme-weather garment" "represents / the ups and downs of married life"; arriving at a punning, ominous close. But there is also a bluntness here: "Taking the Drip Out" squares up to bereavement almost matter-of-factly, seeming perhaps wiser, even more sensitive, for it. Throughout, the poems' elemental forces (the suggestive conjuring of water, fire and lightning are vivid as ever) are typical of the dynamic, Modernist sensibility which characterises Shuttle's fluid style: "better to be water / endlessly on the move / from source to tide".