wake
Jonathan Doering welcomes a new collection by Gillian Allnutt
Thirty years ago Gillian Allnutt, the recipient of the 2016 Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, was one of four editors of a controversial anthology: The New British Poetry. Each of the editors began their section with a foreword. Gillian Allnutt, presenting the feminist poets, offered various thoughts, including: ‘Poetry must be one of the few areas where it is acceptable, indeed obligatory, to try and break up the boxes we ordinarily think in… to reclaim the power of words to affect us emotionally and physically.’
How many writers aspire to ‘break up the boxes’, but how few actually dare do anything truly arresting and original?
Gillian Allnutt’s new collection, wake, is such an arresting, original collage of thoughts, scraps of dialogue and imagery, ‘found’ poetry, and tellingly deployed blank spaces carrying all the power of a silent, meaningful gaze.
Every word weighs more than usual, traditional forms and rhyme schemes are worn away to reveal tissue and skeleton in places, artfully stitched with unobtrusive, specially selected snippets of language, worked like well-chosen threads into hardwearing fabric. It echoes, for me, words in Ralph Hetherington’s 1975 Swarthmore Lecture: ‘Clusters of bright red berries, some wrinkled, some blemished, others perfect… A moment of understanding.’
A gentle but insistent tone permeates wake. It begins with the cover illustration, a Gwen John interior with table set for tea below a high window through which a little diffuse light falls. The image is soft-focused and ambiguous: is that a cross in the window, or just part of the frame? There is a teapot on the table, and other items – but what are they, exactly – a tray … a bowl? One peers closer, changes one’s mind.
Gillian Allnutt strips down and plays with language, often discarding capital letters and punctuation, shifting from third to second person and back again in ‘York Way’, engaging in oblique punning in ‘again’: ‘by the old lime kiln I sat down and ate my sandwiches/ by the near/ / shored/ /…’. In a few deft steps we move from arch cultural reference to By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept through one of many elliptical, precisely bitten-off statements, falling through adroitly laid blank space to that single passive verb ‘shored’, which could equally be a statement of relief or a question, lying on the page like so many other items of lapidary language, like a jewel on velvet – or an insect expertly pinned to a card. The reader is being actively, albeit implicitly, invited to engage with the text, to reflect on what it means both objectively and subjectively, which will often vary according to each reader, and may vary for the same reader across time.
Other pieces in the collection deliberately seem to frustrate conventional notions of poetry altogether: one, ‘The Quince Tree’ being an edited extract from Culpeper’s Complete Herbal, another, ‘Elias’, a prose dramatic monologue in the voice of a non-binary ‘prophet’ recalling meeting a figure that may have been the ghost of her grandmother: ‘I asked if she came in a boat and she said of course she did, / everyone comes in a boat to be born.’ The calm, unfussy, matter-of-fact statements of dream logic are convincing, beguiling, and touched with sinister, whispered truth.
Gillian Allnutt was an attender at Durham Meeting for five years and the openness of worship and her continued practice of meditation run through this work like sinew. The sometime slippery spiritual search within Quaker worship finds a flickering reflection here – at times opaque, at others sharp, always insistent – which many Friends may find nourishing.
wake by Gillian Allnutt is published by Bloodaxe Books at £9.95.
