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The Guest From the Future

Jon Stallworthy

Cover Picture of The Guest From the Future
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (160 pages)
(Pub. Sep 1995)
9781857541328
Out of Stock
  • Description
  • Excerpt
  • Author
  • What did we have in common
    except our century?
    What drew me to them one by one?
    Their kindness-or their fury?
    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 fiancé 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.
    Jon Stallworthy, born in 1935, was educated at Rugby, in the Royal West African Frontier Force, and at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize of Poetry. A Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature, he is a Professor of English Literature at ... read more
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