Blackthorn

Gillian Allnutt

ISBN 10: 1852242701 / ISBN 13: 9781852242701

Published by Bloodaxe Books Ltd November 1994, 1994

About this Item

used trade paperback edition. sunning to spine; lightly shelfworn, corners are slightly bumped. pages and binding are clean, straight and tight. there are no marks to the text or other serious flaws. Seller Inventory # 1120953

Bibliographic Details

Title: Blackthorn

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd November 1994

Publication Date: 1994

Binding: Trade Paperback

Condition: VG

About this title

Synopsis:

Denise Levertov described Gillian Allnutt’s poetry as ‘at once hard and delicate, like wrought iron’. In Blackthorn, these qualities of strength and tenderness are held in balance as she asks the question: What is real and what is metaphorical? Allnutt’s quest for knowledge takes her through places close to her heart (Norfolk, Argyll and especially Newcastle) and places she re-creates with equal vividness (Anglo-Saxon England, medieval Russia, ancient Africa). Much of Blackthorn is a post-feminist exploration of the feminine – and, correspondingly, necessarily, of the masculine. It is an affirmation of human androgyny and a plea for the androgyny of God. The poems come out of worlds known and imagined, outer and inner, tracking archetypal and spiritual levels of the psyche, often within the framework of an ambivalent Christianity.

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.