Sojourner

In a world of glib and vacuous communication, integrity - that which insists on being itself - must retreat: if not into silence, then at least into a kind of inarticulacy. Some of the poems in Gillian Allnutt's sixth collection reveal a deliberate hesitation. There's a rhythm that stutters, stops, starts again. And sometimes there's a distrust of the whole sentence - because it has left out what cannot be expressed in a whole sentence because it is broken, fragmentary, as yet only half-retrieved. These are poems that ask for patience from the reader. They ask you not only to listen but to wait, as you would wait for the words of an abused child, a battered woman, a victim or a veteran of war. At the same time, they are poems that know: you can only refuse to forget if you've learned how to laugh, to let go. And they invite you, sometimes, to smile.

About the Author :
Gillian Allnutt was born in London but spent half her childhood in Newcastle upon Tyne. In 1988 she returned to live in the North East. Before that, she read Philosophy and English at Cambridge, and then spent the next 17 years living mostly in London. From 1983 to 1988 she was poetry editor of City Limits magazine. Her collections Nantucket and the Angel and Lintel were both shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Poems from these collections are included in her Bloodaxe retrospective How the Bicycle Shone: New & Selected Poems (2007), which draws on six published books plus a new collection, Wolf Light, and was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. Her most recent collections, both from Bloodaxe, are indwelling (2013) and wake (2018). She has also published Berthing: A Poetry Workbook (NEC/Virago, 1991), and was co-editor of The New British Poetry (Paladin, 1988). From 2001 to 2003 she held a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship at Newcastle and Leeds Universities. She won the Northern Rock Foundation Writer's Award in 2005 and received a Cholmondeley Award in 2010. Since 1983 she has taught creative writing in a variety of contexts, mainly in adult education and as a writer in schools. In 2009/10 she held a writing residency with The Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture (now Freedom From Torture) in the North East, working with asylum seekers in Newcastle and Stockton. In 2013/14 she taught creative writing to undergraduates on the Poetry and Poetics course in the English Department of Durham University. She lives in County Durham. Gillian Allnutt was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry 2016 in February 2017. The Medal is awarded for excellence in poetry, and was presented to Gillian Allnutt by The Queen.

Review :
'What is most attractive about her work is that she is never solemn about the spiritual life which fascinates her' - Helen Dunmore, Observer 'Hers are original poems, scrupulous, unflashy, meditative, pushing at the ineffable, peculiarly inside language, warning their hard-won spiritual insights and flaring with sudden illuminations that are sustaining for all of us' - Michael Laskey, Aldeburgh Poetry Festival 'She's an original, though, ascetic and startling' - Sean O'Brien, Sunday Times