Denise Levertov described Gillian Allnutt's poems as 'at once hard and delicate, like wrought iron'. Both serious and light in touch, humane and profound, this new collection explores the manifestations of the Spirit, tracing it back through the familiar world of Christianity to its roots in the shamanic. This journey goes 'about and roundabout': living in past and present simultaneously; seeking to marry masculine and feminine - in the figure of Mary Magdalene, say, or those of the almost ghostly mother and son in 'Steppe' or 'In Armenia'. The language of these poems inhabits the state, the indwelling, of meditation - that nest of thin air - berthing what, a moment ago, was neither here nor there. indwelling is Gillian Allnutt's first new collection since Wolflight (2007), included in her Bloodaxe retrospective How the Bicycle Shone: New & Selected Poems.
When Gillian Allnutt was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, Carol Ann Duffy wrote that her work `has always been in conversation with the natural world and the spiritual life'. Her latest collection, wake, shows the two beginning to meld into one: to speak for, even as, one another. As her title signals, these are poems about looking back, keeping watch over the dying and death of an old world and the ways of being human in that world; but also forward, waiting for the new world and being ready to awaken to it when it comes. There are, as always in her work, many displaced people. No one here is fully at home in the world. These are turbulent times - individually and collectively - and the poems here reflect that. And yet the poems are more `among' than `about' people: speaking out of the horde, and the hoard, of humanity as a whole.
Contemporary arts, both practice and methods, offer medieval scholars innovative ways to examine, explore, and reframe the past. Medievalists offer contemporary studies insights into cultural works of the past that have been made or reworked in the present. Creative-critical writing invites the adaptation of scholarly style using forms such as the dialogue, short essay, and the poem; these are, the authors argue, appropriate ways to explore innovative pathways from the contemporary to the medieval, and vice versa. Speculative and non-traditional, The Contemporary Medieval in Practice adapts the conventional scholarly essay to reflect its cross-disciplinary, creative subject. This book ‘does’ Medieval Studies differently by bringing it into relation with the field of contemporary arts and by making ‘practice’, in the sense used by contemporary arts and by creative-critical writing, central to it. Intersecting with a number of urgent critical discourses and cultural practices, such as the study of the environment and the ethics of understanding bodies, identities, and histories, this short, accessible book offers medievalists a distinctive voice in multi-disciplinary, trans-chronological, collaborative conversations about the Humanities. Its subject is early medieval British culture, often termed Anglo-Saxon Studies (c. 500–1100), and its relation with, use of, and re-working in contemporary visual, poetic, and material culture (after 1950). ‘The Contemporary Medieval in Practice is both wise and unafraid to take risks. Fully embedded in scholarship yet reaching into unmapped territory, the authors move across disciplines and forge surprising links. Thought-provoking and evocative, this is a book that will have an impact that far belies its modest length.’ – Linda Anderson, Newcastle University
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