How the Bicycle Shone : New & Selected Poems

Allnutt, Gillian

ISBN 10: 1852247592 / ISBN 13: 9781852247591

Published by Bloodaxe Books, 2007

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 4963944-n

Bibliographic Details

Title: How the Bicycle Shone : New & Selected Poems

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books

Publication Date: 2007

Binding: Soft cover

Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis:

Winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry 2016
Poetry Book Society Special Commendation

Denise Levertov described Allnutt's poems as 'at once hard and delicate, like wrought iron'. They are both serious and light in touch, deeply humane and spiritually profound, showing the spirit surviving amongst the tatters of Christianity in a modern wilderness.

How the Bicycle Shone: New & Selected Poems includes selections from her books Spitting the Pips Out (1981), Beginning the Avocado (1987), Blackthorn (1994) and Nantucket and the Angel (1997), as well as the whole of Lintel(2001), Sojourner (2004) and a collection of new poems, Wolf Light (2007). She has since published two later collections, indwelling (2013) and wake(2018).

Gillian Allnutt won the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry 2016, awarded to her on the basis of her body of work.

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 won the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry 2016.