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The Guest From the Future

Jon Stallworthy

Cover Picture of The Guest From the Future
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Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (160 pages)
(Pub. Sep 1995)
9781857541328
£9.95 £8.96
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  • Excerpt
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  • An old friend told Jon Stallworthy of her flight from war-torn Poland, carrying in her bedding-roll a coverlet she was embroidering for her fianc� and herself. Her story bears a curious inverse relationship with that of the `Lady of Shalott'. Tennyson's patrician artist in her tower, forced to choose between the world and its `shadows' in her mirror, opts for the world and is destroyed; the peasant artist engages with the world and is sustained by an art that reflects that engagement. The modern story Stallworthy traces over the ghostly outline of the old points a parable about one function of art, what Seamus Heaney calls its power of `redress', in this or any time.

    Other poems in this book evoke other women survivors: the poet Anna Akhmatova; the painter Francoise Gilot, Picasso's mistress; a survivor of the siege of Stalingrad. Each poem engages with an earlier one, such as Akhmatova's `Poem Without a Hero' and Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.
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