Gillian Allnutt's Lode reviewed in The Guardian & Telegraph
Reviews in Guardian, Telegraph, Little Review, TLS & Northumbrian; podcast and radio interview; Guardian Poem of the Week. TS Eliot Prize review, videos & Writers'...
Gillian Allnutt will be reading from Lode at the TS Eliot Prize Shortlist Readings at London's Royal Festival Hall on Sunday 18 January, 7pm (in-person & livestream);...
Bring me my preserving-pan.
It belonged to Gran, my Gran.
Tip the washed crabapples in
and water they can boil and bob about in.
They’ll simmer until tender
and we can wander.
We’ll set two chairs upright in the dining-room
back to back with about six feet between them
and lay two tied-together bamboo poles
across the top. Think cross-bar on a bicycle.
We’ll set the mixing-bowl upon the milking-stool
between-chairs, in the middle.
Bring me my jelly-bag. That’s right, that’s butter muslin.
Hold it open now and I will tip the tendered apples in,
suspend the bag from the bamboo poles and tie the corners over.
Quietly, under cover
of the coming night, we’ll wait for it to drip into the mixing-bowl
upon the milking-stool
and all shall be well
and the moon and the heron, all manner of thing, shall be well.
*
My Garden in Esh Winning
The sheep are loud about their lambs
and no cars come.
It’s tea-time
in the small eternity of lockdown.
Nor does the tractor come
in no uncertain terms
of trundle-clatter.
Nor do trucks come
shifting down a gear
near the bottom of the garden.
Under the willow – whose would-be umbrella’s
no stay against the stall and shove of the wind –
there’s little protection from
Hargreaves.co.uk.
I lay my hand on the deeply divided
trunk of the willow, as if
patience had been tested there
and trust.
My hands are full of their own
sore places.
I hark at the thorn-pierced places –
blackthorn, hawthorn, rose-thorn –
of a garden weather-hardened,
cruel as time.
May 2020
*
Corbridge (for my sister Elizabeth)
The river full of itself, intent, contained.
A listening in the rain
as if it were everyman or woman walking alone.
The church with its Roman arch carried straight
out of Corstopitum.
The tower grounded and squat as only the Anglo-Saxon.
The vicarage, the unforgiving, fortified as yet
for all the border-raids remembered
in its silent thick stone –
a brooding inwardness unfit
for man or beast.
By the king’s oven we wait, as women do
as women medieval would have done
for bread or for the host –
involved in the recitation of the rain
involved in the recitation of our own
the told and the untold pain.
July 2017
Contents List
POSTWAR
12 Audience
13 Corbridge
14 refugee born London 1949
15 Dunstanburgh
16 a place beyond belief
17 Berthe
18 Crabapple moon
19 Poem for John Clinging
20 Pink Jenkins
21 Private Passion
22 Flame-thrower
24 My father, mislaid
25 note
LOCKDOWN
28 Golden Saxifrage
29 On having to leave York University without the clock
30 Azuma Meditation
31 The Walk (allowed)
32 If these days should be final
33 My Garden in Esh Winning
34 Lockdown
35 The way she remembered it
37 To be honest
38 At 71
39 Marney’s Boots
40 Mask
EARTH-HOARD
42 ‘Wouldst thou witten thy Lord’s meaning in this thing?’
43 At Ware
44 Beechwood
45 of the trees in the wood by the old pit line
46 summertime
47 Germander Speedwell Veronica chamaedrys (Linn.)
48 Do the birds worry?
49 Solitude
50 The Song of Arachnid
51 My hands, yes
52 I love this poor earth for I have known no other
53 Trist
54 dark night of the soul
55 Footnote
56 Afternoon in the Garden
57 Found Poem
58 Flâneur
59 for only then can
60 Sea Change
63 Notes
71 Roughage
Related Reviews
From reviews of wake:
'Gillian Allnutt’s spare, elegiac poems are like runes on bone; messages from another world... There is rich thought compressed within these poems, where spirituality is all the more telling for its quiet capacity to surprise.’ – Martyn Halsall, Church Times [on wake]
‘… Allnutt’s poems disclose the spiritual that is always already a part of the natural world. They attempt to open up new channels of contact between faith and humanity that can transcend historical or geographical limitations. These musical poems function like prayers, for those displaced and forgotten.’ – Nell Osborne, The Compass [on wake]
'Wake, Gillian Allnutt's new collection, is a contemporary pilgrim's progress, confronting doubt and the cruelties of the world both now and in a historic perspective. She travels the border between this world and the world of the spirit, combining the two in radiantly-spare poems, beyond-haunting, yet grounded in the moment.. a profound examination of human experience in language both searing and serene.' – Penelope Shuttle, ARTEMISpoetry
‘Meditation is the filter through which themes, intertexts and language are developed. This gives a personal, multi-layered dimension to the poems pointing to a search for a greater significance and a deeper sense of life. Nevertheless, the poems are not abstract or unreachable to the general reader; on the contrary they are rooted in ordinary life that emerges in words, objects and stories.’ – Carla Scarano, London Grip [on wake]
‘To read her poems is to be struck by their elemental, worn, limber intelligence, what Adam Thorpe, the poet, playwright and novelist, praises as their sense of ‘half-revealed mystery’. Her startling, beautiful, mythic work was recognised earlier this year with the award of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.’ – Jonathan Doering, The Friend [introducing an interview with Gillian Allnutt]
