Lintel - Softcover

Allnutt, Gillian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852245476 ISBN 13: 9781852245474

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 2001

Synopsis

Gillian Allnutt’s Lintel gives us poems of the threshold; poems that stand at the edge, looking back as well as forward; poems that arise out of known, imagined and imaginary places, such as the landscape of Tabitha and Lintel (somewhere between Haworth and the Holy Land). They show the spirit surviving amongst the tatters of Christianity in a modern wilderness in which the arational is decried as irrational. But Gillian Allnutt’s poems are also ambivalent in their approach to history, embracing change where the past needs to be broken with while at the same time holding on to what needs to be salvaged from the wreckage. As the wild girl Lintel, serving in the convent, says: ‘It’ll be as if I’d brought the breakers in with me.’ Poetry Book Society Choice, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

About this title

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1852245476
• ISBN 13: 9781852245474
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 64